Designer Nida Mahmood’s creations are inspired by everything Indian — with retro headgear sporting images from Bollywood films and helmets featuring Bollywood icons like Gabbar Singh

Quirkiness at its best is the leitmotif at National Permit. The shelves of the boutique store in Goa are enlivened with elaborate turbans trimmed with buttons, petite topis and bonnets, all hand-made by Shilpa Chavan, the woman behind the store. Trained in the art of hat-making at Central Saint Martins, London, and having apprenticed with Philip Treacy, British milliner with a formidable reputation, Chavan maintains that the whole point of a hat is to make the wearer beautiful.

Cut to the spacious studio of fashion designer-cum-milliner, Nitin Bal Chauhan in south Delhi. More quirkiness greets you in a studio that’s a veritable treasure trove of hats. There are as-colourful-as-they-can-be hats, pirate caps and assorted headgear that is a medley of unlikely material like grills of table fans, faux currency notes and wires.

The milliners are here — and how. They are creating witty hats and headgear for the bold and the beautiful. And they have declared that the more bizarre the headpiece, the more eyeballs it grabs. So, no surprise then that the milliners are pressing into use anything that they can lay their hands on — wires, defunct telephones, antique junk, Anything. The hats ruling the roost are big, feathery, extravagant, at times even petite, but they are exclusive and a huge hit with the swish set.

“There’s a huge demand for embellished and ornate hats and people are willing to pay any price for them,” says fashion designer Kunal Rawal.

Designer Nida Mahmood is doing double duty as a maverick milliner. A relative newcomer on the fashion scene, Mahmood’s eclectic style extends to headpieces for each of her season’s collections.

Meanwhile, a muted, East-meets-West theme runs through fashion designer Kunal Rawal’s line of hats. You can’t miss his baseball cap-like trucker hats and cane fedoras (these are creased lengthwise down the crown and pinched in the front on both sides) that are hot-sellers at his Mumbai studio.

“Functional hats are my forte. I make them butch (or masculine) to go with my menswear collection and for the line of androgynous clothes for women,” says Rawal.

But if you are looking out for conventional pretty hats to wear to polo matches and cheerful Sunday brunches, ace designer Ritu Beri’s collection is the one to check out. While she conceptualises her hat lines in her Delhi studio, they are painstakingly made by her team of designers in Paris.

Shilpa Chavan is inspired by tribal motifs and her headgear is an elaborate concoction of feathers and plastic

“My ambition has been to put a hat on every stylish head. To that end I make wide-brimmed hats in natural fibres such as straw, cotton, denim, jute and felt,” says Beri, who retails them from her studio in Sainik Farms.

Meanwhile, hats happen to be a passion for fashion designer Delna Poonawalla who belongs to the Poonawalla family, famous for breeding thoroughbred race horses in India.

“Though I am not a milliner, I like to promote hats and hair fasteners. Hats are and always have been a big part of the races. Horse racing and glamour, after all, go hand-in-hand,” says Poonawalla.

Occasionally she works with British milliner Walter Wright for one-off pieces, and at other times she sources hats from all over the world and adds bits and pieces to embellish them. They are available at her Ceejay House boutique in Worli, Mumbai.

When did the hat appear on the Indian horizon? Says Rawal: “Initially, there were few personalities like adman Prahlad Kakkar who adopted hats for an everyday look. But hats actually surfaced on the social circuit in a big way only in the last four to five years.” While fedoras are a big hit with the men, for women, over-the-top cocktail hats or the more subtle and petite fedoras are the winners.

Interior designer Nisha Jamvwal is a diehard fan and has a collection of some 500 hats including the brimless beanie, some slouched fedoras favoured by act-ress Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy’s signature pillbox hats. She says: “I see more hats now than I did when I came back to India some 10 years ago, especially at Mumbai races like the Poonawalla Million or the Derby. While earlier I had to bring back hats from Europe and South Africa, now I have a choice of designer hats in the country.”

An avid fan of hats, interior designer Nisha Jamvwal wears a wide-brimmed hat by designer Delna Poonawalla

The renaissance of the hat came with post-modern milliners like Phillip Treacy, David Shilling and designer Alexander McQueen who made crazy confections for the head (headpieces designed to look like crocodile teeth, lobsters, antlers).

Indian designers are taking a leaf out of their books and experimenting in their seasonal collections.

“If you see my creations on a woman and wonder how on earth she is wearing it, for me, it’s a job well done. For, that’s the effect I want my hats to have on people,” says Nitin Bal Chauhan, his eyes twinkling. And he’s letting his imagination soar with pieces that are rich with references to contemporary life.

For instance, take a look at his ‘concoction’ that’s a bright red telephone receiver complete with a digit pad and circuit resting on the inverted front-mesh of a table fan. You simply plonk it on your head —wires, mesh, receiver and all — to make a style statement.

As Chauhan focuses on the contemporary Indian, so do some of the other designers who have included typical Indian motifs in their hat designs.

Mahmood who retails her headpieces only from her studio in Shahpur Jat in Delhi has christened her Autumn/Winter 2009-2010, ‘High on Chai’. The hats in this line are made of used knick- knacks, from a typical chai stall including trays carried by the chai boys.

Accordingly, you come across shapes that epitomise Mahmood’s design sensibilities. They are vivacious, colourful pieces made of cups, kettles and empty biscuit packets and trimmed with catchy slogans like ‘Cutting Chai 6 rupees’. Then there are more hats like the one-off biker helmets that sport images of Bollywood icons like Gabbar Singh.

“The idea was to bring out the streets in a glamourised way. We don’t need to borrow from the West and shun what we are. If I can make you look cool my way, why shouldn’t I?” notes Mahmood.

(Above) A telephone-set hat by Nitin Bal Chauhan; (Below) designer Ritu Beri is all for creating wide-brimmed hats for cocktail parties and Sunday brunches

At National Permit, Chavan’s newest collection, Life in Technicolour, is dedicated to tribals. She unveiled this line at the recently concluded Lakme Fashion Week. Her hats have gone tribal with a lot of plastic, 3D elements and feathers for effect. “I like to redefine hats as exclusive headpieces,” emphasises Chavan who also styles costumes and designs jewellery.

So, if there are feathery head-dresses a la the Mohawk hairdos, there are also hair-bands embellished with three-dimensional plastic structures of town buildings. She makes a conscious effort to do limited pieces, all of which she handcrafts with anything she can find — from old military badges to sundry flip flops.

Rawal too is having fun getting creative. “There is no right material and no wrong material — there is just material,” says Rawal. His military berets, fedoras and floppy hats come with an Indian touch — each with badges with elements from the Ashoka Chakra or Indian texts embossed on them. “Indians are travelling extensively so I would like them to wear their Indianness — on their heads,” adds Rawal.

He retails his hats from his studio in Juhu, Mumbai. But the range of his trucker hats can be also bought at the boutiques of Aza in Mumbai and Persona in Hyderabad.

For some of these hat-makers, their creations have transformed into objets d’art. Chauhan is used to setting up art installations of his headgear at social dos while Chavan stumbled into the concept of fashion-art all by chance. After some buyers from Villa Moda, a luxury department store in Kuwait, bought some of her headgear, the pieces got shipped to AlSabah Art & Design Gallery in Kuwait instead, that also belonged to Villa Moda owner.

As a result Chavan’s headpieces sell briskly as pieces of art at the concept store, I Love Souk, a part of the AlSabah Art & Design Gallery. Her headgear is also selling at Drap-Art gallery in Barcelona. She also sells at Selfridges, Kabiri and My Sugar Land in London, her own boutique in Goa and Anonym in Hyderabad.

For designer Kunal Rawal, the fedora is the hat of the moment

But you have to keep some elements in mind while looking for a hat to accesssorise with. “It has to complement your features — the jawline, cheekbones and the eyes. The dip of the hat, or how it falls on your forehead, is also crucial,” says Chauhan.

And most importantly, you need to choose the right hat to go with the occasion — and the outfit. “Which is why I customise hats for weddings, cocktail parties, graduating ceremonies and others,” says Beri.

A great hat speaks for itself. So, it can make a hole in your pocket, yes.

The price tags are steep. Chavan’s headgear starts at Rs 4,000 and can scale upto Rs 50,000 if she happens to use expensive crystal, vintage jewellery and French laces. Mahmood’s very detailed pieces from ‘High on Chai’ range between Rs 5,000 to Rs 40,000. And Beri prices her hats between Rs 5,000 and Rs 25,000.

But then there’s the famous story of a customer who complained to the great master, Christian Dior, about the exorbitant price for a hat, given that it took merely a bit of tulle and some feathers to make. The master took the hat apart, gave the customer the materials and said with a grave bow, “The materials, madame, are free, it is the genius that costs”.