Jenny Beattie
Jenny makes bespoke headpieces for individuals, fashion, and theatre. With a background in sewing and a sculpture degree, she has been a maker her whole life.
She discovered a love of millinery during more than a decade of living in Bangkok, Thailand, where she began making headpieces for her community. These early hats were witty and silly but it was here that she saw that hats could tell stories and be more than just something beautiful.
Materials have always been important to Jenny; sometimes coming as the first element of a hat. She loves fine millinery materials as her 2020 HATalk prize winning hat, The Haberdasher demonstrates. But she has a growing reputation for transforming discarded, leftover or unusual materials into sculptures for the head. Her first of these ‘Trash Hats’ was ‘Starling Murmuration’ which was shortlisted in the ‘’Technique and ‘Wearability’ categories in the London Hat Week 2020 millinery competition.
Jenny’s work thrives on the idea that traditional skills and techniques can co-exist in a modern world and that she can combine them to produce striking and wearable art for the head.