Lock-In-Style

How and why to wear hats during lockdown, and accepting face masks as the new must-have accessory (literally)

What I realized during the first lockdown, is that amongst most of my friends there was a divide between people who;

used this time to get super fit, healthy, try on a new style, learn a new skill, wear make up and dress up to do their essential shopping, and
Turned into cavemen

I realized this when I rung the doorbell of a banker friend who’s normally very well turned out, and was faced with an over-bearded, pyjama wearing, cereal chomping guy at 3pm. Out comes his girlfriend, wearing a pretty vintage scarf on her head, glowing skin from all the beauty products she’s finally given herself time to try, looking very trim from her new lockdown exercise regime, and excitedly talking about this online course she’s doing to help with her business.

My banker friend won’t let me post a photo of him for identity (read; embarrassment) reasons, so I drew you a picture:

It was then when I realized which category I was going to take pains to fall into.

We’ll all have been in different headspaces during the last few months, from deep sadness, to anxiety, to boredom, to motivation, to gratitude, these emotions come and go, and sometimes we experience them all at once. Many people are finding ways to be more creative, conscious, and community driven. I have noticed there’s a much bigger demand to shop local and seek out slow fashion.

I covered some of the ways in which we got creative in our household via IGTV (candle making, leather carving, making random stuff from tiles and wood we found in the shed) – how were some of the ways you guys got creative? Where have you found the inspiration to solve the new challenges that this lockdown is showing us?

Ordinarily, most people would have a dress code to adhere to in the morning, whether going to work or doing the school run. But suddenly, what to wear when you have nowhere to go?

How do you feel when you don’t have a reason to dress up? For me at first it was nice to always be in my comfys, but I started to really miss having a reason to dress up. Is it ridiculous that I actually felt sorry for my clothes that they didn’t get to be worn out this year?? Like, my poor lonely summer dresses totally missed their season to shine!

Even with the restrictions, I still think there are plenty of opportunities to dress up and wear a hat. Indeed, given the state of most peoples ‘lockdown hair’, we could argue that a hat is this years most important accessory, after the face mask, of course. Here is a new creation – my wide brim Panama hat (still a fair way to 2m wide though) with a scarf, doubling up as a face covering:

Let’s explore some ways that we can wear our hats in 2020:

Essential Errands:

Just today, a new client Kit told me he wore his hat when popping out at lunchtime, he said; ‘Right now we can’t go out and we don’t have reason to dress up, so putting a really nice hat to do your errands makes you feel really good, I wore my new trilby today, and I definitely noticed people looking at me, it felt great!’

And here’s me, bringing a bit of wildness to our local Tesco, in matching hat and face mask. I wouldn’t normally opt for leopard print jacket as well, but there’s definitely more of a ‘what the hell’ attitude with going all out, when I go out:

Daily walk – even add a veil!

We had a glorious summer and now a glorious Autumn. Here are a couple of clients Naomi in the summer, with her wide brim Panama Hat; Kim also in the summer, with her straw trilby with veil; Zoe a week ago, sporting a felt Dimple Trilby with veil.

As these ladies show us, if you don’t have an occasion to wear a hat to, then get it into your daily outfit!

Zoom

Zoom very quickly became the catalyst for communication, and I think we’ve all been guilty of dressing our top haves whist still donning pyjama bottoms. Dressing up with the focus on top is something a milliner knows all about, so how wonderful that all our socialising these days focuses on our top halves!

I’ve had clients wear their Sahar Millinery hats for team meetings and online weddings.

Here is Lorna, wearing the hat I made for her daughters wedding a few years ago:

And Naomi who works for the NHS wrote to me about how her team were making small efforts to bring some lightness and joy to their meetings:

“ This is me 10 days ago in a COVID bed huddle at the hospital I work in. To brighten team meetings we choose a colour each week and have to wear or have something of that colour in our screen each week and decide who was the most inspired, so for yellow one of my team had bunches of bananas on their shoulders. This was the week before last when the colour was lime green, so I dug out the fascinator you made me for Laura’s wedding in 2008. I won!! It is pretty tough at work so when Kelly, my Head of Nursing asked me to keep it on for the divisional bed huddle (the hour a day when we collectively try to work out how the hell we will get everyone into the right bed that they need that day & what we need to do to keep everyone safe) to cheer us all up. It definitely worked and a colleague sent me this photo”

Birthdays!

By now a lot of us will have celebrated a birthday or occasion – so throwing a birthday party with your household (or when we were allowed, outdoors) would have been the only option for most. My birthday is next week, let the countdown begin!

Headwear with matching Face Masks – Reversible face masks!

If the face mask is the new must-have accessory, we might as well get deliberate about it. Here are a few of the face masks we’ve made, to match our hats and headbands AND – here’s the exciting thing – we can make them REVERSIBLE!!!

If you see something on our website that you like, for example a headband, then it is very likely we’d be able to make you a face mask to match. Here is me, and my assistant Carmen having some fun on our lunch break last week: