Milliners Go Back in Time : Fashion: In emphasizing trends of the past, some local hat stylists are carving out a bright future for themselves.
Add this to the mounting evidence that women are tired of the more predictable parts of modern life: a little hat shop--Patina Millinery--tucked between a bakery and a swimming-pool supply on North La Brea Avenue.
Patina Millinery is the vision of artists-turned-milliners Jodi Bentsen and Katrin Noon, who have filled the high-ceilinged, garret-like space with custom-made, one-of-a-kind hats that evoke another era.
Ask about a wedding style and the owners bring out a sumptuous white model swathed in white organza. A riding-style hat is made of faded black straw, crisply formed into a high chapeau with a shallow brim, banded in generously wide blue-plaid ribbon. The Panama straws are hand dyed, and there are any number of wide-brimmed, very “Dangerous Liaisons”-looking models.
Although Bentsen and Noon’s store is the newest and among the most original in town, it joins a handful of custom hat shops that have a point of view and offer a bit of customer-coddling. One may browse and pick up a scarf, a piece of jewelry or a one-of-a-kind gift on the same stylistic wavelength.
And the designers plan to add other merchandise, including custom-made hat boxes; hand-painted, garlanded hat stands; picture frames adorned with twigs, acorns and ribbons; a small line of cards inspired by the store’s handmade price tags (which customers wanted to buy), and a few pieces of custom furniture and antique jewelry.
For now, Patina is a place where it’s difficult to stay tense. Not Beverly Hills- or even Melrose Avenue-slick, the shop has a terra-cotta brick floor, walls painted the rose colors of an Italian sunset, and pieces of “found” furniture (some for sale), such as a fanciful chair painted spackle-blue with patches of green, red and gold. On a recent afternoon, a small drop-leaf table was set with plates of tarts and croissants for 4 o’clock tea, which Bentsen and Noon take every day and which they may eventually offer to customers “if it works out.”
Atop a form at the back of the shop is a magnificent hat: a high, puff-crowned black velvet with black-satin ribbon and a single seductive feather curving from behind the brim.
Its creators named it the Lady Jane, and it appears to come straight off the cover of a Victorian romance novel. It did, in fact, grace a recent cover of Victoria magazine (Hearst’s phenomenally successful ode to romanticism and femininity). Inside, the editors paired Patina’s hats with poems by Shelley and Swinburne in lavishly styled photographs that looked as though they had been shot through a stocking.
After that, Bentsen and Noon were “inundated” by calls and letters from as far away as South America and Canada, as well as “out-of-the-way places, not necessarily big cities,” Bentsen said. They recently shipped a Lady Jane to a 97-year-old in Missouri who bought it to wear to church, but more of their out-of-town orders go to places such as New York and San Francisco.
The designers believe their local customer is often a woman who regularly shops at Ecru or Maxfield on Melrose for that pulled-together look, the “overwhelming” ensemble. “Then she comes here and we’re sort of the weekend, evening--it’s fun dressing,” Bentsen said.
But there’s also the customer, Bentsen said, “who actually lives this--who dresses this way all the time, people who wear a hat every day, and also collect hats. They have hundreds of hats.”
Mutual Love
When Noon and Bentsen met they both worked in the photo industry, but it didn’t take them long to discover their mutual love for handcrafted textiles, for the techniques that predate mass production and for the intrigue of another time. That period, as Noon roughly traces it, “starts with the Eduardian, the 1890s and a little before, and goes through to the teens, skips the ‘20s and spends a little time in the ‘30s.”
For a couple of years they worked weekends and evenings in a converted garage behind Bentsen’s Century City home, “getting it down, developing our style and slowly building a clientele,” Noon explained.
Finally, convinced that the time was right, they left “very, very good jobs,” although both still work part time to help bankroll the operation, which accounts for Patina’s somewhat abbreviated hours, Wed.-Sat. noon to 6 p.m.
The milliners purchase the straw and felt bodies for their hats and, although they have their felts blocked, that’s the extent of their outside contracting. They block and sometimes dye their own straws. All of their felts are lined by hand and each hat has a grosgrain, which is hand-sewn. There’s nary a glue-gun in sight, and shelves in the back workroom are stacked to the ceiling with shallow boxes filled with vintage silk flowers, berries, bits of greenery.
The philosophy of the shop is that “you can’t get by substituting new for old in anything we do,” but the ribbon, in particular, is purchased from suppliers whom neither will name. It is also scrounged from swap meets and expeditions to “the deepest, dankest” parts of warehouses for boxes that haven’t been opened in 50 years. Noon pulls a spool of vintage ribbon, made in France, from behind a leaded glass cabinet door in the back workroom: “This is double-backed satin. It’s . . . it’s just yummy . The weight of it. They still make it, but it doesn’t have the quality it had then.”
At Patina, hats are priced from $185 to $325. The Lady Jane sells for $285. The shop also carries a few pieces of clothing custom-made by local designers ($150-$400) that feature the same Old World look--uncomplicated, long skirts, oversized jumpers and, for winter, draped, crushed-velvet jumpers and dresses.
The designers welcome walk-in business and they take appointments. They particularly enjoy involving the customer in the creative process, Noon said, if, for example, “they’ve a fantasy hat they’ve always wanted.” They also, Bentsen noted, “spend a lot of time with people when they come in the door, helping them try on the hats; it’s very one on one.”
