ilovehats

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Chapeau Claudette officially began her millinery career as a hat sculptress.
After attending Parsons School of Design in NYC, as a photography student for one year, she moved to Germany in 1984. Whilst working as a photographer for art galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin, she wrote and was granted funding from Hamburger Film Buro for a short film, "Sightseeing". This black-and-white movie, making fun of Hamburgers (people of Hamburg) reaction to a tourist (armed) with a camera ,
was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. A velvet cap that she had sewn by hand during Christmas of 1986 was admired at various parties during the Berlinale and she was asked to create a hat collection for a up and coming German designer.
Between the years of 1988 and 1992 her "Galerie de Mode" hat boutique presented young and well known hat designers along side her own hat collection. The brand name Chapeau Claudette actually came into being whilst doing promotion for her soft-rap maxi-single,
"Fashion C'est La Latest Attraction" in 1992. Whilst promoting her music in Amsterdam, Claudette discovered the paperhatvase object 'De Bonnet' on the head of a bicyclist, she re-launched the hat object under the name "Chapeau Claudette pour de Bonnet"
at Premiere Classe in Paris. The hat object inspired Arik Levy, Ron Arad and Tom Dixon.
Tom Dixon was one of her first wholesale clients before it was launched as a hat at Liberty.
Impressed by the hat culture in London, Claudette decided to re-open her boutique under the name "Chapeau" before relocating to London in 1995
In the years from 2004 to 2012, she produced and sold her
fascinating fascinators, handmade unprocessed
felt hats and mini top–hats from the Outland Boutique, her studio
off Brick Lane, to TopShop, ASOS and various boutiques around the world .
In 2013, she was forced to leave her boutique mostly due to family circumstances.
The hat studio moved into her London flat, and she continued to sell online at www.ilovehats.com. During her breaks from hat making, she began taking daily photographs of the clouds from her rooftop in Pimlico. In December of 2013, she and her friend, Cassandra Postema, founder of EmiandEve.com worked via Skype to turn Claudette's photographs of clouds and Cassandra's illustrations into an interactive bedtime story about the fairytale journey of an unborn baby who is overdue.
So Sorry I'm Tardy is available as an iBOOK on Itunes in four different languages
thanks to her son, Viktor Baur , her Spanish and French friends and the help of the website www.peopleperhour.com
This American milliner has been collecting feathers, pearls and a variety of hat making materials for over 10 years. Some of her most popular designs were created from the leftover hat-making materials that she would recycle, creating
"Somethin out of Nuthin" headpieces.
The mini-hat design workshops were launched during the Brighton Fringe Festival 2014 teaching participants how to design their own one-off mini-hat creations


that compliments their face. The first workshop in Brighton took place atTheCoachHouse. ember 29th until December 7th 2014. In January 2015.


LIFE IS A HAT PARTY LET'S CELEBRATE IT!