Photo by Jason Kruppa, courtesy Mimi Holaday
“Vive” style bright white heavy fur felt with vintage horse hair tassel pin and pheasant feather, modeled by Shonteira Allen, makeup by Marissa Mizell.
In Mimi Holaday’s Baton Rouge home studio, the old and the new coalesce in luxurious sprays of feathers, smooth curves of steamed felt, and a row of head-ish-shaped blocks lined upon a shelf. The art of millinery—distinguished from hatmaking as the crafting of headpieces made of finer materials than the common cap—is an old art, historically equipping the upper classes of virtually every civilization, from the ancient Egyptians to today’s British royals, with the loudest, most expressive of fashionable statements.
In a fashion landscape where hats have ceased to be so mainstream, Holaday’s boutique hat-making business, HALO MIMI, takes an accessory that is these days almost a statement in itself, and adds in the luxury of contemporary character. Atop premium materials and hand-molded shapes, Holaday indulges in the long-held tradition of ornamentation, incorporating everything from plumes and leather and studs to guitar picks and dragonflies and playing cards.
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Photo by Mimi Holaday
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Photo by Mimi Holaday
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Photo by Mimi Holaday
In her living room, four rows of shelves display some of her more recent favorites: a white felt boater with a light blue ribbon; a distressed periwinkle straw; a tuxedo-approved women’s tophat with a tiny white feather flaring outward; a clear topless wide brim halo, pressed wildflowers floating inside. She pulls out a Milano straw sun hat she’s been working on, which is adorned in voodoo-doll-esque stitches and discolorations—“just some of my magic tricks.” Hanging from a string above her kitchen table is an in-progress version of one of her most recognizably eccentric pieces—a black lace birdcage Holaday is building for New Orleans artist Ashley Longshore.
“I get these crazy ideas, and want to challenge myself,” said Holaday, pulling out another such novelty—her porcupine headdress: a Maleficent-reminiscent tiara with two horn-like diamonds rising from the forehead, bedecked in porcupine quills—sinister, bohemian, and chic all at once. “I definitely welcome any design challenge, but these are my showpieces. In day-to-day fashion, you don’t need something so avante garde to grab people’s attention. I always try to keep it interesting, like—wow, your hat is so cool—but I tend to keep it monochromatic, clean in design. I like to be creative, but in small subtle ways.”
Christina Leo
Fashion veteran and Slidell native Mimi Holaday launched her specialty hat business, HALO MIMI, in 2017 after winning New Orleans Fashion Week’s Top Design Competition. Hat features an upcycled drum cymbal by Secondline Jewels. Dress by Century Girl Vintage.
She draws a certain strand of creativity simply from the individuality of her clients themselves. Specializing in custom pieces, Holaday’s skills as a stylist elevate her pieces into what can only be described as “perfect fits.” Guiding each client through the process of selecting materials, shapes, and styles, she makes suggestions based on the person’s gender, face shape, lifestyle, haircut, height, and overall aura. “I can kind of fit everyone’s look, build up their existing character” she said. “Sometimes customers have something really specific in mind. But sometimes I’ll just do something I think will be cool, and most of the time people love being surprised.”
Holaday’s fashion instincts are deeply entrenched. Growing up under the haute couture wings of her mother Susan Holaday, who modeled for New Orleans milliner Yvonne Lafleur, hats have always been part of her overall mode of expression through fashion. Though she grew up in the Slidell, with every intention of attending LSU’s design program, Hurricane Katrina landed her in Virginia, where she later acquired a degree in Business at Virginia Commonwealth University. With aspirations to become a fashion designer, she worked her way across the industry, working as a stylist for stores like INTERMIX and Saks Fifth Avenue. “But then I just got burnt out on the retail thing, and knew that wasn’t going to be the end of the road for me,” she said.
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Photo by Mimi Holaday
Left: Distressed velour with pheasant feather wrap and porcupine quills.
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Photo by Mimi Holaday
Plaid-inspired distressing on powder blue glazed straw with frayed edges.
She moved to California, and over the next three years acquired specialized degrees at the Los Angeles Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in both Fashion Design and International Manufacturing and Product Development, a nine-month postgraduate program that sent her to study in France, Italy, and China. Over the next few years she worked for design companies the likes of Wiley Wilson, RVN, and Design Printsiples—“But I kind of realized that wouldn’t be the end of the road for me either,” she said. “I wanted to be doing something with more creative freedom.”
[Read this: Louisiana native Christopher John Rogers makes his mark on the New York fashion scene.]
Her official gateway into the specialization of millinery opened as recently as 2015, when she was traveling in London and decided to buy a premium-quality hat at Harrods. “I didn’t have access to products like that in the U.S.,” she said. “And I didn’t understand why. I wore that hat every day for like eight months. I was crazy about that hat.” Upon returning to California, Holaday dug into the world of millinery, and in May of that year she took a three-day hat-making class at Fullerton College.
Photo courtesy of Mimi Holaday.
Silver heavy fur felt with velvet band and tulle detail, modeled by Katlin Turner, FT45 agency.
Then a decade out from Katrina, she was starting to miss her hometown. She had heard about the New Orleans Fashion Week Top Design Competition, and felt it was a calling to launch everything she’d been preparing for thus far. “I knew it would be an opportunity to get on stage and show what I was capable of,” she said. She moved back to Louisiana and started building her collection, with the original intention of selling both the hats and the corresponding looks, which—today—still live in her closet. Pulling out a crazy-beautiful feather boa vest and draping it over my shoulders, she says, “I wanted to emulate this Bohemian nomadic mysterious woman, but also using all of these elements of turn-of-the century classic.”
[Read this: The Cajun Hatter—Colby Hébert makes custom hats with Cajun verve.]
The collection took her a year and a half to build, but in March of 2017 she entered, winning both Top Design and the Yelp People’s Choice Award. With her tendency toward couture quality, though, she quickly realized that the scale of mass production wasn’t for her and decided to focus on specialty hats exclusively. “Intricate, delicate work is my forté,” she said, adding that even today, her commitment to specialty quality keeps her manufacturing small-scale and closely-held. She officially launched HALO MIMI in September 2017. Since then, Halo Mimi has participated in New York Fashion Week three times, has been represented in showrooms in Los Angeles and New York, and featured in major publications including INDUSTRY, People, Cosmopolitan Mexico, Elle Bulgaria, and has been worn by the likes of Billy Porter, Gigi Hadid, Ryan Jamaal Swain, and Wyclef.
Photo by Mimi Holaday
Men’s cognac panama straw fedora
In the back room across from her studio, Holaday sits on the floor to show me her raw materials: a basket holding dozens of unshaped hats in handwoven Panama and Milano straw, in rabbit, in beaver, velour, in every color of the rainbow (silver and alabaster are her most popular). This is where the process begins. “You can see how quickly it could get overwhelming for a client,” she said. “The options are endless.”
Reaching around, she pulls out one of her finished hats, a gray beauty that rests surprisingly heavily in my hands. “This is coypu,” she said. “Nutria.” A premium felt that she’s only started offering since March, Holaday’s coypu is sourced from Louisiana and is comparable, she said, to beaver, which is top of the line. “I’d like to eventually only have coypu because it is an eco-friendly product, but right now I’m only able to source it in small amounts in limited colors at certain times. But we’re working up to that.”
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Photo courtesy of Mimi Holaday
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Makeup by Alexis Cascio. Photo by Jason Kruppa, courtesy of Mimi Holaday.
Holaday pictured in one of her novelty vinyl record hats (it’s a Whitney Houston album!). Top by Shop Maiya Boutique.
Where possible, Holaday says that she works to source her materials as ethically as possible. Though she hopes to one day do away with rabbit completely, for now she sources her rabbit felts from a vendor in the Czech Republic who raises them for meat and shaves, not skins. And though she gets most of her feathers from stores in New York City, “I did recently find a husband and wife who go pheasant hunting in Louisiana, and they’ve agreed to give me some birds,” she said. “I love pheasant, and they’re eating them, and I know exactly where it is coming from. If I can source something from a place I’m more confident about, that will be my first choice.”
Once the materials are selected, the shape planned—Holaday engages in the two-hundred-year-old tradition of hat blocking. On a shelf in her studio sits her collection: dozens of blocks from a traditional hat block craftsman in Poland, another several that are antiques recovered from a factory in France. She points out a handful of black, plastic looking ones—”Those were done by a 3D printer by this guy in Brooklyn, who is taking this old trade and helping artisans like myself—milliners—to achieve the effect of the old, using technology and material that is new.”
Photo by Jason Kruppa, courtesy of Mimi Holaday.
“Audrey” style premium felt, wide brim fedora with patent leather underbrim and vintage silk satin ribbon, modeled by Katlin Turner, makeup by Marissa Mizell.
And then, she’s also got her own. “After my three-day hatmaking class, I took a separate course learning how to make the blocks,” she said. “I don’t make them out of wood, but out of Styrofoam or polystyrene. Hatmaking is part skill, part tools. So if you’ve got the skills to make your own tools, you’ve got the world in your hands. It gives me the ability to achieve any shape I want to create.”
With a block and a plan, steam and practiced hands, she’ll mold and meld and the material into a bowler, a tophat, a fedora, or something altogether new. Then she’ll study it, let her imagination run wild, the client at the forefront. She’ll embroider, burn, stitch. Add tassles, snakeskin, feathers. Or maybe. . . just a ribbon. Sometimes, after all, the hat speaks for itself.
