Hut ab!
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
When we first arrived in Berlin on Monday and were exploring the neighborhood around our hotel, Jeremy and I came across a snazzy little hat shop. It was closed at the time, but I vowed that I would go back at some point and look around since hats are one of my Favorite Things in the Whole World Ever.
Today I finally got my chance. I went for a late breakfast in the little café where Jeremy and I had cake and coffee on our first afternoon in the city, and on my way back to the hotel I swung by the hat shop. And I almost, almost didn’t even go in because…well, it’s a really tiny shop, and I hate that sensation you sometimes get when you’re the only customer in a really tiny shop and you feel like you’re being scrutinized. So I walked by, glanced in and saw the proprietress and no one else, and then hemmed and hawed outside before telling myself to stop being so stupid and self-conscious and just go in and look at the damn hats.
So I did—and wouldn’t you know, I had a great time trying on loads of different hats and chatting with the extremely nice milliner. I kept coming back to a really cute little felt cloche hat with a tiny zipper on the brim at the back, but I wasn’t crazy about the color and it was a bit too small for my big head. But then the milliner said she could make pretty much any hat I wanted, and she brought out a book full of samples of felt in all different colors, and suddenly I found myself ordering a personalized cloche hat in a lovely burgundy felt with a cheeky contrasting green zip at the back.
To top it all off, when I told her that I was leaving for England the next day and asked if she could send the hat on, she said that since she actually had the felt in the shop, she would start making the hat right away so that I could pick it up before leaving Berlin tomorrow. So I’ll swing by the shop tomorrow in the early afternoon, and hopefully I’ll be leaving Berlin with my own pretty, customized, felt, waterproof, crushable, 1920s-style cloche hat. How cool is that? Yay, milliners! Yay, hats!
Comments
1
what a cute hat it sounds!
I love buying special presents for myself when I’m away. It reminds me of the trip every time I wear or see it.
this hat sounds so cute! Can’t wait to see it on flickr.
hmmm millinery could be a new craft for you ;)
2
Yeah hats is right! The cloche still will be super cute on you.
I have a great dark grey felt hat that is 1910-esque with dark burgundy velvet band and a rhinestone hat pin that I bought in Boston about 10 years ago. I found it as I was packing yesterday and debated if I should bring it with me. I left it at home, as I didn’t want it to get crushed on the plane.
3
Ooh, Ms. Jen, that hat sounds beautiful!
One of the things that really sold me on this hat was that the milliner said you could fold it flat without damaging it, so it’s really good for traveling with. That’s become one of my key criteria for hats—even my cowboy hat folds flat! :-)
4
That’s very cool that she was able to make it overnight. We experienced something similar a couple of years ago in St. Augustine. My wife found a pair of pants she liked the shape of at a little store on the second floor of a building in an artsy district the other side of Route 1, but they were the wrong size and she wasn’t crazy about the fabric. Talking to the proprietor, it turned out that she had made the pants (not everything in the store was her original stuff). She offered to make my wife a pair that fit in the fabric of her choice, but we were heading back to New Jersey the following afternoon. No problem, she could have them ready before we left. And so she did.
5
Hi Ralph, that’s so cool - here’s to independent traders, and to people skilled enough to whip up a hat or a pair of tailored pants in the space of 24 hours!
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