Lady Laura Cathcart is a British couturier milliner known for her bespoke hats and headpieces for weddings, racing, and other special occasions. A leading society milliner, she also creates ready-to-wear collections and has collaborated with high-end fashion brands like Emilia Wickstead and Amanda Wakeley.

When people think of British entrepreneurs, they don't usually think of a couture milliner working in the depths of Shropshire, surrounded by wall-mounted hats, mannequins, Cecil Beaton sketches and a small black pug curled up in front of a fire.

Artisan fashion entrepreneurs are an endangered species. Survival in the current economic climate has become increasingly difficult, and many famous brands have failed. So how have I survived, when even Coco Chanel, whose career journey from milliner to fashion icon is an inspiration to me, eventually gave up on millinery?

I have never chosen the route of third-party funding. I believe that if you create a truly original and timeless brand, hand-crafted couture products that emotionally connect to your clients, then you have a chance of success.

Collaboration is a better path. I have recently worked with leading fashion designer Emilia Wickstead on several of her recent London Fashion Week shows: we host pre-Ascot parties in her beautiful Sloane Street flagship shop, and I make bespoke hats for some of her high-profile clientele.

My work with Emilia was serendipitous. My hat studio in Shropshire is set within a courtyard of cottages: one of these was let by a New Zealand businesswoman called Angela. When something went wrong with her internet, I offered her my studio to make a Zoom call.

It turned out the call was with her daughter, Emilia. “Mummy, where on earth are you?” she asked. “Why are you surrounded by beautiful hats, and who made them?”

I also make bespoke hats for clients from the worlds of racing, politics, showbusiness, high finance, for British royalty, and for more mothers-of-the-bride than you could fit into a beer tent at Cheltenham. And I make hats for period dramas: actress Charlotte Radford’s upcoming World War I film Can You Hear Me?, partly filmed at my Elizabethan home of Upton Cressett, will feature my Edwardian hats.

I think a key secret to my success is that I don’t really regard my work as a normal job. It’s a creative passion. When, in May 2019, Harper's Bazaar listed my business as their top Royal Ascot milliner, I had to pinch myself.

So, what are the highs and lows of my 15-year journey? My mother, Vivien Greenock, is a well-known interior decorator, and my early life was spent being surrounded by beautiful wallpaper and textile samples, and I quickly developed an eye for beautiful fabrics.

But, although I trained for a while at Colefax & Fowler in Mayfair, and later at George Spencer in Chelsea, I soon realised that I had a creative obsession with designing hats, not decorating homes or designing dresses. So I enrolled at the London College of Fashion and sought out a millinery internship.

I only knew of one milliner, Gina Foster: her father, Tim Foster, had painted a portrait of our family in Norfolk. I went to see her at her shop off Kensington High Street only to be told that I’d missed the deadline for the millinery course at the Chelsea College of Arts and I’d have to wait a year. A month later, she rang to say her intern had left and could I start as soon as possible?

I opened my own boutique in 2011, and my first studio was a back storage room in my mother’s office. I began making hats for friends, many of whom were going to dozens of weddings a year, and my first big break was being chosen as an official milliner for Royal Ascot as part of the Royal Ascot Millinery Collective. I suddenly found myself in the same company as Philip Treacy.

In June 2018, I got an unusual call for a memorial service hat from Princess Olga Romanoff, president of the Romanoff Family Association, who lives in a 13th century manor house in Kent. “My daughter Alexandra and I are heading to St Petersburg to attend the 100th anniversary memorial of the murder of the last Tsar, my great-uncle Nicholas II, and his Tsarina. Could I come and see you to discuss a suitable black hat?”

After the Telegraph article on the service included Princess Olga wearing my black pillbox hat, I suddenly found myself in demand as a milliner for big funerals. I went on to create a chic black pillbox for Samantha Cameron to wear at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. I also created a pillbox for Akshata Murty, wife of prime minister Rishi Sunak, to wear at the Trooping of the Colour. Another hat that got media coverage was the 1950s-inspired extravagant “Strawberries and Cream” picnic hat that I created for singer Katherine Jenkins to wear on top of a double-decker bus at the Platinum Jubilee Pageant.

One of my favourite commissions was being asked by the owner of Charbonnel et Walker chocolates to create a line of special “My Fair Lady” hats – inspired by Cecil Beaton’s film costumes – for their Royal Ascot Week shop window. The extravagant hats all came with their own boxes of chocolates made from silk and golden thread: my husband, after a glass of wine, helped himself to a violet cream, thinking it was real.

But things do not always go according to plan. Once, a friend volunteered to drive one of my summer hat collections back to Shropshire from London after they had featured in a Selfridge’s fashion show. I then got a distraught call from her saying her car had been broken into, and the entire collection stolen.

The result was the police putting out a message to their underworld gangster contacts asking them to look out for a line of Laura Cathcart Royal Ascot hats being sold on the black market alongside stolen Rolexes.

I also enjoy my occasional role as a fashion “etiquette aunt”. For example, should a girl inwardly sigh if a man fails to remove his top hat (one prays it is at least silk) once he ushers you inside a Grandstand lift at Royal Ascot?

I'm often asked about the etiquette of hat wearing: the truth is, most people think it's enough to know that the general rule is “hats off indoors” for men and “hats on indoors” for ladies. But it is not as simple as that. I once discussed this with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, author of Snobs, and an authority on social etiquette.

He is clear on the subject. Any etiquette guide that says it is acceptable to take off one's hat inside, at any time, is simply wrong. “I can't speak for fashions in other countries, but an English lady never takes her hat off inside at any time, other than in her bedroom.”

Kissing whilst wearing a hat is an especially tricky area of etiquette. I once found myself sitting next to former English captain David Gower at a charity cricket event. When he learnt I was a bespoke milliner, all he wanted to know was whether I could create a hat that allowed two people to politely exchange kisses on each cheek. “Can you make a hat that has extending lips that you can squeeze like an atomiser and is a feature of the hat?” he asked.

He had a good point. When a woman is wearing a large wide-brimmed hat, kissing someone on the cheek whilst keeping the hat in place would be almost impossible. 

Fashions change. Whilst most men know they should remove their top hats when talking to a lady (always hold the hat with the inside lining facing inwards), or just doff their hat if saying hello, the kissing etiquette for two acquaintances who encounter each other is more nuanced. In the Edwardian era, the setting for Cecil Beaton's famous “My Fair Lady” Royal Ascot scene, it would have been unthinkable for anybody in the Enclosure to try kissing in public: even a peck on the cheek was considered risqué.

My advice is that if you are wearing a wide-brimmed hat at Ascot (perhaps a variation on the pink silk organza hat with Belle Époque soft frills, as worn by Audrey Hepburn) is to cut out any public kissing, because it is just so physically tricky. Or, if you are determined to smooch whilst out racing, commission me to create the ‘David Gower’ kissing hat.