Mad about hats

For almost seven decades Lindsay Kennett has been following fashion and for more than 40 of those he was the milliner to society's high flyers. Sarah Harvey takes a whirlwind tour of the 79-year-old's fashionable life.

Where Lindsay Kennett hangs his hat, is his home. The thing for Mr Kennett, is that there are simply too few hooks.

As a result, there are hats in his home where you should be eating. From the house, the hats flow over into auxillary spaces.

The garage is not filled with tools, nor cars, but boxes of hats. Not that it's all hats, there are books too - mainly Vogue.

And mementoes - Chanel. You see, for Mr Kennett, fashion is not a week but a lifetime. And in particular, hats.

In the basement of his Dunedin home he carefully pulls open boxes, stacked high against a rough wall and full of hats of every style from the 20th century.

A favourite is a bright red, wide-brimmed hat covered in feathers of the same hue. He swings it around as if he were in a fancy department store and shows up close the hours of work in the detail of the brim.

A yellow felt hat is held lovingly by familiar hands as he pulls it over a hat block to show it to best effect.

There's an iron next to the block and a loosely ordered collection of tools, that in their casual arrangement hint at the hobbyist. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The hats produced here are the work of a master. If any of this seems unlikely - master milliner discovered in Dunedin basement - the back story will only add emphasis.

Let's go back a few years. Picture Glenorchy in the 1920s. The only access to and contact with the outside world is by the steamer TSS Earnslaw whistling and gliding over the surface of Lake Wakatipu.

Otherwise, the landward side of the Rees Valley Station farm gates offer only rolling, tussocky hills stretching for kilometres beyond, and the unforgiving pit, weathered hands and blackened faces rising from the Invincible Mine.

They are images that could not be further removed from the fashion centres of London, Paris and New York (or Dunedin).

But for Lindsay Kennett, born in 1928 in Queenstown, the fenceposts at his parents' sheep station were not just punctuation marks for the No 8 wire, they were blank canvases on which he could draw clothes and models.

The Earnslaw played an important role in those sketches, or at least its cargo did. The boat did not just bring trade to the isolated Glenorchy area, it also brought inspiration, in the form of tourists sporting the latest fashions.

Lindsay was an unconventional boy. From the age of 8 or 9 he was fascinated with fashion - a fascination he did not get from his mother or his father, the latter working in the unadorned occupation of a miner.

How did it happen? ‘‘It remains a mystery,'' he says.

‘‘I can't really answer it, because it remains a mystery. I mean I can't really understand why a boy of 8 or 9 would be interested in fashion in a remote area like Glenorchy.''

There are more conventional childhood memories of running amok in the bush with animals at Paradise, and playing with his brother, two years his senior.

But all the while he fed his appetite for fashion, with pencil drawings of women in clothes he dreamed up or saw on the steamer - that rare point of contact with civilisation.

‘‘Our means of escape,'' Mr Kennett says.

‘‘I would draw on anything. I would even draw on fenceposts if the wood was nice and smooth,'' he says.

‘‘In those days there was hardly such a thing as casual clothing. The people on the boat would be wearing what we would call Sunday best.

It was acceptable for a lady to wear a fur coat on an excursion and men would always have their striped suits and ties on.

‘‘When I saw some of the people coming off the Earnslaw I would draw them or take note of their clothes. I would go home and tell my mother about them and she would say ‘Draw them and then I will know more what they were like'.''

In 1940, the Kennett family moved to Dunedin. Lindsay, who was 12 at the time, started at High Street School - a horrifying experience after the small country school at Glenorchy.

As a distraction, he occupied himself with what was to become a lifelong obsession - movies and Hollywood glamour.

At the end of primary school, Lindsay enrolled in art school, developing his love of drawing and supplementing it with painting and sculpting - a skill which would come in useful during his career as a milliner.

At a loose end after leaving art school in 1943, he went into a job that he ‘‘didn't care for at all''- as a sales assistant in the fabric department at Arthur Barnett.

He endured the position for four years by whiling away his time learning about fabrics in the back reaches of the department store.

He also worked for an advertising agency doing freelance fashion drawing. While there, he was told that if he was interested in fashion he was in the wrong place, he needed to be in Wellington or Auckland, the fashionable centres of New Zealand.

Window-dressing was his next job, again allowing him an outlet for his flair for fashion while keeping his head above water. The first job in that role was at Wolfenden and Russell, at that time a boutique store, in South Dunedin.

‘‘That was a wonderful job, because I worked completely on my own and I could do what I liked with the windows and nobody ever questioned it.

‘‘But while I was working there I was thinking about what the advertising agency had said about moving to Wellington.''

In 1950 he decided to make the move north, again drifting into window-dressing, this time at Kirkcaldie and Stains Ltd, a company run from England, meaning all the latest fashions were at his fingertips.

It served to whet his appetite.

‘‘I learned an awful lot about fashion at Kirkcaldie's. For anybody who was interested in fashion, Kirkcaldie's, I would always say, was a finishing school, because you learned the very best of anything to do with fashion.''

It was also here that Mr Kennett first dabbled in hats. In Dunedin he had taught himself, by using a pudding bowl, to make hats for the Dunedin Operatic Society. Naively at that time, he had never heard of a hat block.

On a whim, he decided to take a hat to the buyer at Kirkcaldie and Stains.

‘‘She wasn't a very approachable person, but I muscled up the courage. She said ‘If you're making any more hats, I'll buy them'.''His first foray as a commercial milliner was memorable. The hat was forest green with similar-coloured bird feathers, ‘‘not quite 1920s but deep-fitting''.

It was also the hat that announced the start of his millinery career.

In 1952, Mr Kennett was again given advice to move so he packed his belongings and went to Auckland, the home of millinery.

As he tried to establish himself in hats, he again worked as a window-dresser, this time at Smith and Caughey Ltd.

Within a year, he had made a collection of about 30 hats.

It was still very much a cottage industry. He made the hats, this time with a hat block, from his own flat, or when he was between flats he would make them in the laundry room of a private hotel.

After being approached by the buyer at Smith and Caugheys, who also wanted to buy his hats, he decided to make this a full-time career.

‘‘From that very day in 1952, 40 years later, I was still making hats for Smith and Caugheys and the same applied to Kirkcaldie's.

‘‘Somehow everything fell into place. I never looked back.''

It was fate, he says.

Fate again played a part as his fashion life took another turn in 1953. A friend, the director of the War Memorial Museum in Auckland, and his wife wanted a fashion show. He became involved.

It was also at this time, that Aage Thaarup, a Danish man and the royal milliner, was to visit New Zealand.

As fate would have it, he wasn't allowed to bring made-up hats into the country.

Mr Kennett was given the deconstructed material and told to make what he liked in preparation for Mr Thaarup's arrival.

‘‘Make hats for a royal milliner, way down in New Zealand!'' he remembers with glee.
He met Mr Thaarup at the Transtasman Hotel.

‘‘There in a suite of rooms, were hats everywhere, lying on beds, lying on chairs, and he was sitting in front of the mirror with a hat on.''

He was offered work in London with Mr Thaarup, but his business in New Zealand was ‘‘growing and growing and growing''.

Six months later, as fate would have it, Thaarup was bankrupt.

In the autumn of 1957 a nervous Lindsay Kennett embarked on a path that would make him one of the most well known and respected milliners in New Zealand.

A buyer rang from Wellington and asked him if he would like to travel with his collections every spring and autumn throughout the country. That March he took his first steps with his collection in Wellington.

‘‘I was really quite nervous leaving my hotel, where they had put me up, and passing a chemist shop, I went in and asked them if they could give me something for nerves,'' he chuckles.

For 15 years following that day, he went from department store to department store with boxes of hats stored in tissue paper, even returning to ‘‘old Dunedin'' for a show at Arthur Barnett in 1964.

‘‘I loved every moment of it.''

He also did charity shows, the biggest in a hangar at Ohakea, but one of the most memorable was a show in a small rural town in the North Island.

Halfway through the show the fire siren went off and everyone left to see where the fire was, only returning when they were satisfied they knew what was going on.

In 1959, at the height of his career, he travelled to Australia and was given grave news - the hat trade was about to collapse.

‘‘Five years later it was true. Hats disappeared almost overnight, milliners were very distraught.''

Meanwhile, he made hats while the sun shone.

He had opened a hat shop in Parnell in 1962, with a friend opening an antique shop next door. It was at this stage that he started to employ people - a sales lady, a milliner, two outworkers and school holiday apprentices.

His clientele was of the highest social standing.

‘‘Most of my clients were very wealthy and titled people.''

Some of them were fashionably eccentric, he said. They would squint at themselves in the mirror, and at him, with only a lorgnette (handheld eyeglasses). ‘‘It was terribly stressful keeping two types of businesses going.''

So four years later, when it came time to renew the lease, he didn't bother. However, Lindsay Kennett hats survived with the support of stalwart customers and some big weddings in the Dalmatian community, and in the '70s people started liking hats again.

It was the pillbox hat that saved his career, with customers queuing up at department stores to buy them.

For the first time, in the '70s, he made men's hats for men's pop groups.

‘‘There were certain times that pop groups wanted to be like gangsters and wanted to look like Al Capone, so with what felts that I could obtain, I made gangster-style hats with the brim down.''

He also established a cult following with stitched berets, which tided him over until retirement.

‘‘They took off to such an extent that I had to get help again. Then I thought it was time to retire, which I hadn't ever.''

In 1990 he retraced his steps, heading south to ‘‘old'' Dunedin but retirement, in so many words, never really happened.

Kirkcaldies and Smith and Caugheys insisted on ringing up and ordering. He worked for Ballantynes and Kirkcaldie's right up until 1996.

After finally wearying of the hat world, he returned to the art world and fashion drawing, joining the art society to ‘‘rejuvenate'' the art side of things.

It was in 1993 that he made the ‘‘mistake'' of offering to hold a fashion show at the Otago Settlers Museum.

‘‘It came out before I realised what I had said.''

He ended up doing ‘‘100 years of hats'' for the museum in 1995. It was the biggest show yet.

It was repeated again in early 1996 and taken to Oamaru and Queenstown.

In 1997 he went to Niue in what he describes as one of the highlights of his career. He was approached by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked if he could help the traditional weavers on the island make their straw hats more fashionable for export.

He also visited Tonga on the way home.

‘‘It was terribly interesting,'' he said.

Retirement has been looking a more likely prospect again in the past few years, but Mr Kennett will hold a fashion show for the Zonta Club in June, showcasing 130 hats from 1910 to 1970.

Hats off, or perhaps hat on, to Lindsay Kennett.

- Lindsay Kennett will open his third exhibition of drawings, titled ‘‘Fashion in Retro-spective 1910-1960'', at the Moray Gallery, Dunedin, today at 11am. There will also be a group of Niuean hat designs he did for the Niuean weavers in 1997.