The Magic of Millinery: HOOD London
I sit down with Gabrielle Djanogly, Author, Milliner and co-founder of HOOD London, to discuss communication, collaboration and creativity 👒
If you know me well, you will know that I adore fashion – the history and future of fashion, what fashion communicates and expresses about a person and moment in time. I also love the craft of fashion and the creative process and play that goes into it. Craft is something we should discuss more in the era of fast mass-produced fashion – what are we losing if we don’t prioritise craft?
Because the essence of my work is about communication – and lately, I’ve been dipping my toe into the more visual aspects of communication – I’m struck by how many ways a person can communicate something through what they wear – or what they don’t wear – and why this matters, what impact it has on others, what it says about how we see ourselves and move through the world. Image is interconnected with identity, and I’m fascinated by the impact that one has on the other. Style and substance are separate things. But if you can possess both then you can elevate yourself and others around you.
As a self-declared Advocate of Accessories, I was curious to speak with Gabrielle Djanogly/@gabrielledjanogly, an Author, Milliner and co-founder of HOOD London/@hoodlondon, an incredible independent accessories label she co-founded with Adèle Mildre, who have made hats for everyone, from Beyonce to Dita Von Teese to Linda Evangelista who graced the cover of British Vogue wearing one of HOOD’s hats that they did in collaboration with designer Richard Quinn. Even Barry Keoghan has graced the cover of W Magazine wearing one of HOOD’s creations. Gabrielle’s creativity seems endless!
I must admit that I have a soft spot for Milliners – one of my grandmothers was a dressmaker and also made hats, so I’m a huge admirer of Gabrielle’s work. Gabrielle is also a talented author and is currently writing a book about female milliners – at one point the meaning of the word milliner was a women who made hats for women.
We discuss communication, creativity, collaboration and how one thing leads to another…
Enjoy!
Video of Gabrielle making a hat for Richard Quinn for Beyonce
Joanna: Hi Gabrielle! What inspired your creative journey into millinery?
Gabrielle: When I was at school I couldn't draw. I didn't have a GCSE in Art. And it never occurred to me that I would make things.
When I went to university I studied English Literature. And generally, through kind of losing my mind, it seemed obvious that I was not going to have a stable job in journalism. At one point, I looked at some Floodlights courses, and there was a one-week course in Millinery, which I don't even know that I'd heard of before, but you could go and make hats at the London College of Fashion for a week.
And I was just like, okay, this is it. This will make me sane. And it was that making something from the beginning that I just fell in love with. And so it was a really unplanned journey. But once it started, I didn't want it to stop. It was a really nice free space in which you could make things. And having been told I couldn't make things because I couldn't draw, it was great that it didn't matter that I couldn't draw.
And then, quite weirdly, I must have been making hats for about 10, 15 years when my mum pulled out this sepia picture. And she said, oh, look, isn't this funny? And it was a picture from the 1920s, 1921 in fact. And it was my great grandmother in her hat shop in Ipoh, in Malaysia. And it had just occurred to my mother to share that.
I was really lucky. My mum, who is a knitter, sewer, maker and crafter, she was really encouraging. She realised that making things is good for you. And my dad always made things. If you can make things and your body wants to, you need because otherwise there's a weird energy that you're not using.
Joanna: How did HOOD London come about?
Gabrielle: I'd been working at Stephen Jones for a long time. I was there two or three days a week and it was a really brilliantly creative and slightly bonkers place with no natural light. When I first started working there, we would smoke downstairs. It was a bit nuts, but you met loads of really creative people who wanted to do something, but we were not going to be leading. You aren't going to get anywhere because the only name there was Stephen Jones.
Adèle started working there and I think she saw the same thing and she wanted to have kids and we talked about it. You know, this won't really happen for a bit but wouldn't it be great to start a collective? It was me, Adèle and another friend Cornelia and we set up this thing and the idea was we'd set up a marketplace where people who made hats could sell them online and reach people. Adèle’s very good at connecting with people. She'd come from LA to London, and I think the idea was that we'd take a small cut and run this business like a collective. But it was a nightmare.
There were ten Milliners, but a lot didn’t get delivered on time. If it did, we had to deal with shipping. We weren't making any money as we were arranging photoshoots, managing the website and getting hats from people. I’d never run a business before. It was way more work than I'd realized, it was complete madness.
And then it was just Adèle and me so we decided to set up as a label because we could sell our own hats. We could make them, and we could manage each other. It's still just us now and we do our accounts, we have an accountant, but we get everything together. We do shipping, we do customs, we do press, we do photoshoots we do everything.
Joanna: You’ve worked with Adèle Mildred for a number of years at HOOD and she has illustrated a number of your books. It must be wonderful to have a creative collaborator. Why do you think that you work so well together? What’s your argument in favour of having a creative collaborator?
Gabrielle: It's more fun to argue with someone else, it's more productive. It’s that sense of bouncing things off each other. Adèle is more of a yes person. I'm more of a no person. I need pushing sometimes to do something and sometimes she needs pushing not to.
I think the other thing is having a different view on things. Sometimes seeing how it will work best and having someone else's view. Sometimes those views can be quite far apart, but you find, in the middle place, a little sweet spot. We’ve worked together for so long with so many different projects that we've almost got a shorthand now. HOOD is very much a mixture of visions, but it's also what we're good at. Adèle is very good on social media and starting a conversation whereas my I’m good at fine-tuning things.
We've enjoyed working together, I love how she sees things. And she's always onto the next thing. I’m a slow dreamer. I want things to happen, but I enjoy the journey and process. Writing's very easy to do on your own but when creating a business I think it’s better to collaborate. It would be really hard to do it on my own.
Joanna: I love how you’re both a milliner and a writer – a mix of the visual and the written word. When did you start writing and how did you carve out a career as a writer and published author?
Gabrielle: I’ve always been writing because I’m drawn to the idea of a story. The funniest thing is that even that is linked to Adèle. I wrote a story called “Hunting for a Father” that will probably never see the light of day, but she wanted to illustrate it. That went nowhere. Then I proposed a book to Liberty London, which she had beautifully illustrated that went nowhere too, but then they came back to me and asked me to write for them.
When Adèle’s baby daughter was crying, Adèle said, if you don't stop crying, David Bowie will come. So I ended up writing her a story called “The Bowie Man” where David Bowie comes at night. We ended up sending it to David for his birthday, but then he died a few days after that. We went to Prestel with that book, and they said no. But they enquired about other ideas, and they ended up publishing my book of forms and Adèle illustrated that. It was very odd because it wasn't a story. I don't even know how it happened really. But it happened. Then I got an agent and I started doing some other writing for Liberty London, and it all kind of became this thing I never wanted to give up on.
I love children's stories. I've always loved them. I've always thought they're the nicest place to go to with characters and places. Children's books, unlike lots of adult books, always give you room. They let you feel your way around in these little worlds.
Joanna: Communication is at the heart of your work. What are you most passionate about communicating?
Gabrielle: There's a kind of feeling in which we are too shut down and quiet and calm and in our spaces. And in some ways people are that bit bigger with the hat on, or they feel a bit more confident having read a that story or met that character.
I like the idea that you take up a bit more space when you're in a hat. I've always disagreed with that Chanel quote, “"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off.” I think you should add rather than remove.
With storytelling I'm absorbing all these other people. I never wear headphones in public, you miss out on the gold within conversations. I'm forever listening and taking in. When you read about other characters, you begin to not mind your own thoughts so much. You always feel a little safer once you've read about someone else doing something crazy, cool or brilliant. There's also a playfulness in creating characters and a similar playfulness in making hats that people are going to wear.
Joanna: What are you writing about at the moment?
Gabrielle: A hat book that’s about my hat making but also about female milliners that haven’t been written about enough. At one point the meaning of the word milliner was a women who made hats for women.
It really wasn't until the 1960s that men took over as the big designers. Historically, it was too personal a job for men to be doing it. In the 1800s, the straw plaiters in Luton were an army of women and children making the industry work. And they're kind of forgotten about. Great women behind an industry doing a lot of the legwork.
There's a bit about the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. They were female founded because of the millinery trade. All of the male ornithologists wouldn't really listen to their concerns about the millions of birds that were being used on hats. So these women, a group in Didsbury and another in Croydon, got together and set up the RSPB. There are lots of little histories tied to hats; the suffragettes and how they used their hats as merchandise, how the hat pin was the first weapon women could carry. Lots of lovely stories about women in the industry.
When I say I'm a Milliner, people are like, oh, do you know Philip Treacy or do you know Stephen Jones? And yes, they're great. I’m not taking away from them. But there’s so much focus on them. Even they acknowledge they've been inspired by great women milliners. But there's not enough recognition. In the workrooms I’ve worked in there would often be a head male designer and loads of talented, creative women working for them.
Another book I'm working on is a middle grade story, which I'm slightly obsessed with and which I have to write because it's a coming-of-age story. It’s about a girl who gets her period in her last year of primary school. I realised, having friends who've got girls around that age, that no one really tells them anything.
Suddenly we're now talking about perimenopause, yet we're still not really allowed to talk about girls’ first periods and how young they can be and that the age is getting younger. And I really worry that there's young girls who aren’t informed.
Joanna: What’s the inspiration for your next collection at HOOD?
Gabrielle: Our next collection is medieval inspired. We've got some great bits of metal and Adèle’s been looking at some arch shaped metal helmets, trying to pair them back to make them into wearable hats. We'll probably have my mum involved doing some knitting samples because my mum does our hand knitting. That's for our Autumn/Winter collection.
Joanna: What has been your favourite collection that you’ve created with Adèle at HOOD? And who is the most fascinating client you’ve worked with?
Gabrielle: My favourite collection is always the next one, it's always the one that's in your mind’s eye.
The collections we’ve done with Dita Von Teese were brilliant, she is fascinating and she works so hard and knows exactly what she likes. We also work with @beautyspock/Francis O’Sullivan. I feel like she's part of Hood but she's also a client and a really great collaborator. She has a great vision. @neciahairstyling/Sarah Wood is another great design collaborator and we share our studio with her.
Last year we worked with a lovely costume designer called Susie Coulthard on a film, making hats for a film of A Hundred Nights of Hero, based on the graphic novel. She’s one of those inspiring people who visualises things, can figure them out, but is also open to other ideas and how you want to make something.
This conversation is a masterclass in what Roland Barthes might’ve called “le grain de la voix” — that unmistakable texture of personal voice that makes communication more than just information. Gabrielle’s journey from literature to millinery, from stories on paper to sculpting narrative in felt and feather, beautifully proves that creativity isn’t linear — it’s a web, often stitched with invisible thread.
What strikes me most is the way hats here aren’t just fashion statements — they’re acts of semiotic rebellion. The hat pin as proto-feminist weapon! The suffragette’s hat as merchandise and message! One could write a whole cultural history of resistance through accessories. And perhaps we should.
We’ve entered an age where “content” too often overshadows craft — fast fashion’s visual noise drowning out the slow whisper of a handmade piece. But this reminds us: craft is memory, inheritance, defiance. To wear a HOOD hat is to wear intention. And to make one, as Gabrielle does, is to reclaim space for artistry in a world that often confuses speed with innovation.
I also love the refusal to obey Coco Chanel’s tired dictate about removing one accessory before leaving the house. Sometimes maximalism is truth. Sometimes more is the most honest you can be.
Wonderful piece, Joanna!