When Barbara Keal first showed her hats in public a few people were, as she recalls it, disgusted. “One woman said to me, oh they’re amazing, but I’d feel so guilty. She thought they were real - that I’d scalped a fox. I was like, how can you think that a fox’s ears are actually that big? I’ve scaled them up.”
Barbara’s woollen hats are not disgusting. They are striking and gorgeous. But partly due to their totally natural palette (she uses no dye, only natural wool colours) and mostly as a result of the years spent perfecting her felt-working skills, Barbara’s hats do indeed look very realistic. Some would argue that her fantastically life-like eared, horned and antlered creations belong in costume, not fashion. But fashion recognises extraordinary talent at first glance, and since releasing her hats at Origin Contemporary Craft Fair in London last September, it’s been a steep rise into fashionland.
At the end of last year Harvey Nichols bought twelve of her ‘wild woodland beast’ hats for its London store's Menswear International department. The hats were later featured in the window at the luxury retailer’s Edinburgh branch.
In December seven of her creations appeared in the FT’s How to Spend It. Photographer/stylist Damian Foxe’s 10-page fashion knitwear editorial, enwraptured, is so in keeping with the hats’ primitive beauty you can almost hear twigs breaking in the background.
Damian Foxe's enwraptured, FT's How to Spend It
Next month, Barbara and her woodworking artist husband, Rich, will travel from their splendidly bohemian digs in Lewes to Paris for Fashion Week. London based designer Omer Asim has commissioned a set of hats from Barbara in shades of black to accompany his A/W '11 collection at PFW.
Before Paris, the hats (not the Keals, as the couple have committed to not flying for the environment) will travel to Copenhagen and Tokyo, all in the name of fashion.
“It’s interesting to be in a world that you’d never think you’d be in,” she says. “My fears about it were that it was potentially quite flippant, but I don’t know as yet. It’s funny how it’s turned out because lately I’ve been fulfilling masses of very specific commissions, like, I want another ram hat exactly like the one in the FT. Previously that was not how I was working. It was, ooh today I’m having a floppy ears day, you know. But I’ll get back to that.”
Tiger hat
Until recently, Barbara, who is 29 and a busy mother of two young boys, had solely identified herself as a fine arts-based performance artist. Her introduction to feltmaking happened four years ago with a project to make a gigantic woollen dress that doubled as a stage. This came about after the born and raised Londoner moved to Lewes and needed to escape the town. She found herself spending a lot of time on Malling Hill, which juts up behind her home with a lush green hillside.
“It’s been my centre of sanity and I felt I wanted to become closer to that environment by wearing the fleece of the sheep up there." She asked the local shepherd for some fleeces and he gave her 200. "I made a huge dress with a skirt that dropped to the floor and came back up and over, creating a cavelike performance space." The skirts of the dress fit eight people inside and she gave a singing performance in it.
Felt was needed in such large quantities for the dress she used horses from the Working Horse Trust to pull big sheets of fleece which needed to be rolled around a telegraph pole to felt the wool.
“After that I knew it was a process that appealed to me, and I was using materials that were so on the doorstep. Otherwise all that wool is wasted - it’s basically unusable because it’s slightly course, but there’s massive wool wastage even of perfectly good wools. Wool is almost worthless - often farmers get less money for fleece than what it costs to sheer.”
Now the fleeces come to her already washed and carded. Touring Barbara’s small and chilly studio on the ground floor of their home, she talks me through the voluminous bags of wool and reveals her favourite is the local alpaca fleece, which has stronger colours than sheep’s wool.
Offering me a fluffy handful of alpaca fibre, she says: “You have to feel this, it’s amazing.
"I'm quite soppy about wool textures. They say that in South America you can get 52 different shades, but I've only managed to get hold of about 12."
Barbara shows me (workshop-style) how she achieves that delicately melded toning present in many of her hats. “Even though there are just those 12 colours you can get a huge range of different tones if you layer them very thinly. If you lay out a white, and then back it with very dark brown - in the end when it’s felted you’re going to see all that, but even more because they will have worked in and out of each other. It’s really exciting and magical because you’ve got this mass of hair but it comes out with something you can wear on your head.”
Barbara wearing Aberdeen Stag
Barbara in Barbara's Beast in Portland Fleece - "It's what I wear all the time."
She tells me a highly amusing factoid about fate of the FT ram hat. It now belongs to a farmer living near Wadhurst who wears it out in the fields when he’s handling the rams.
All the hats, even the antlered ones, are surprisingly soft and light. The Keal’s lounge wall is alive with them, propped up on wooden pegs made by her husband. After a little break to show me a just a glimpse of Rich’s greenwood furniture – a rocking boat cradle and a window shutter (both of which are expertly constructed and storybook-like in charm and intricacy) - I had to rush myself out, to get back downstairs to the hats. The couple’s combined talent and creativity is that strong, it is simply too much to absorb in one session.
Both Barbara and Rich studied sculpture and strongly adhere to the design tenet, truth to materials. “You know, that whole kind of Barbara Hepworth thing," she says. "The stone is the stone and reveals itself as such, even through the sculptor. The sculptor is revealing more of what the material is."
Richard Keal wearing Hairy Fox made of alpaca fleece
“My work springs very naturally from me. I’m trying to be aware of what I’m meant to be doing, to have intuition of what makes me feel more alive, more right in my world.”
I'm suddenly reminded of something I read on the welcome page of her website: ‘Big furry ears make me happy. It might work for you too.’
“When people try them on they get so excited and are immediately energised. I want my hats out in the world because that’s where I see them as doing their work. It’s an extended sense of making contact with people in the street, the potential for people to be changed by unexpected experiences as they go about their daily lives.”
Which is funny because that’s just how I felt when flicking through the FT on my lunch break last December, I saw that ram hat and had to catch my breath.
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Hats start at £110
Barbara will exhibit a live artwork show in London in September 2011
Model wearing Doe hat made of alpaca fleece
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