“I wear the hats I make for myself, and people stop me on the street all the time,” says Portland milliner, Alicia Carr. “I’ve even had people offer to buy a hat off my head. I say, ‘No, it’s my only one!’”
Alicia Carr’s ornamental millinery confections are closer to wearable sculpture than more traditional hats. Under the label Tattered Gossamer, Carr creates her bold, cinematic, one-of-a-kind hats. Most recently, she’s been working with silk and banana fiber, but she also works with felt, sinamay, buckram and, “lots of tattered pieces of silk, vintage lace and feathers.”
See her latest work here in La Belle Dame Sans Merci shot by photographer Zack Lewis.
Alicia Carr learned to sew when she was young, and financed her wanderings by selling clothes she designed and sewed. She attended the Art Academy in San Francisco, which she loved, and the Portland Art Institute for apparel design, but felt that a design path heading toward Nike or adidas was not a good fit for one as restlessly creative as she. All the while, Carr had been collecting vintage hats voraciously.
Through the Portland Fashion Incubator, which Carr helped to run, she met Portland milliner Susan Murphy who invited her to become her apprentice. Three times a week for a year, Carr worked with Murphy.
” Millinery is such a small world. People all over the world are still doing things in the traditional ways. There is so much room for innovation,” says Carr. And she doesn’t just mean in form and material, but in technique and tool as well: Carr has experimented with creating hat blocks (the wood forms on which most hats are created) out of non-traditional materials.
Carr is currently in New York in response to boutiques there that have expressed interest in carrying Tattered Gossamer hats. Meanwhile you can see her latest hats here in La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
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