A strange sight greets you as you enter Monica Kumalo’s kitchen. On the marble counter sit a row of mannequin heads adorned with a colourful array of chic fascinators and cocktail pillbox hats.
Next to them are hat boxes containing more of her head pieces.
“It’s not always so neat,” says the 66-year-old with a smile.
Some days, hats in different stages of creation, millinery tools, materials and hat-making blocks are littered around the Observatory, Johannesburg home she shares with her husband Dabi, an advocate with the Duma Nokwe group.
With the heat from the crackling fireplace warming up the lounge, Kumalo shrugs off her cardigan and settles comfortably on to the couch to talk about her passion for millinery.
“Hat-making is like being a sculptor,” she says. “You can start with a piece of something and as you work with it, slowly it starts to take shape. Before you know it, wow, it’s a hat.”
To her and many women, hats are far more than mere accessories. They’re a “statement maker”. Women, after all, buy hats and fascinators so that they can be noticed, she says.
“When you have a simple outfit and have a wow hat, there’s no way you cannot be noticed. People also tend to remember the hat far more than an outfit,” she explains.
The abundance of stylish and trendy headgear worn at the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton caused an exciting ripple in the fashion world.
“I dare anyone to say they remember the dresses guests wore. The fashion statement there was more about the hats,” says Kumalo.
Kumalo fell into the millinery world by chance. Born in Red Location, the oldest township in Port Elizabeth, Kumalo was fascinated with the fashion industry from an early age. Her mother taught her to sew and in her youth she designed and made dresses for her peers.
She was encouraged by friends and family to pursue this avenue, but Kumalo says in those days there was “little to do for black people except to become a teacher or a nurse”.
“If a college for fashion had been open to us I probably would have been the Vivienne Westwood of South Africa,” she says with a laugh.
Instead, she obtained a nursing qualification and began working at the Livingston Hospital in PE.
In 1976, she left South Africa to further her nursing career at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, London, where she became a highly trained nurse in cancer research and children’s heart surgery.
On the odd occasion, though, she helped dress her friends for functions and designed their outfits. Eventually her friends convinced her to pursue fashion design. “They said nursing was no longer for me. I was a pretty good nurse but I guess I had already done my share,” she says.
In 1984 Kumalo enrolled at the Paris Academy School of Fashion in London. At the end of the course, students were placed with established fashion designers for their practicals.
All the places were soon filled, so Kumalo’s tutor asked her whether, in the meantime, she would be keen to work with top milliner Siegfried Hesbacher, who’s known as “Siggi”.
It was under his tutelage that Kumalo discovered a knack for hat making. Siggi, she says, encouraged her to do a millinery course.
She took his advice and, in 1994, enrolled in Millinery Design at London’s Kensington and Chelsea College. In her final year, she and other students exhibited their creations at a millinery extravaganza opened by Queen Elizabeth’s milliner Philip Somerville, where Kumalo’s work was noticed by a buyer from high-end department store Harrods.
Two years later, and in her early 50s, Kumalo graduated with a distinction. She carried on working with her mentor Siggi, who continued to inspire her. Kumalo also trained her eyes to look at shapes and translate them into her hat designs.
“I love the 40s and 50s styles, but I can look at a cup, a perfume bottle, the winding shape of a road and the arches of a building, and they will inspire shapes for my hats,” she says.
She had to put her design ambitions aside once again when Dabi, who had been living in exile and working as a barrister for many years in London, yearned to return to South Africa to establish a practice.
It meant he would have to start from scratch, but Kumalo was supportive of his decision. While Dabi headed home in 1998, she stayed on in London and went back to nursing to help support their family financially. She came to South Africa in 2008.
Her love for hats endured, but Kumalo says she had resigned herself to thinking she had “missed the boat”. It was only when a friend asked her to make a hat for a high-society wedding that her passion for the craft was stirred again. She created a raffia turban that caught the interest of other guests.
Through word of mouth, clients came to her door – including the likes of Precious Moloi-Motsepe. Kumalo says although millinery is in its infancy in South Africa, it’s here to stay.
“South Africans are highly fashionable people who will wear more and more hats. We have a saying in England: ‘If you want to get ahead in life, get a hat’.” - The Star