Making it yours with Lee Innocenti
Influenced by cutting edge milliners from around the world, Lee makes time to add details and embellish her very own hat collection. She uses wild colour combinations, colour blocking and pallets that harmonise her own unique style.
...that harmonise her own unique style.
Each hat has its own story. Never content with a ‘run of the mill’ hat Lee commissions artists to assist her hat design journey. The very creative ideas lead her to produce a hat like no others. All elements of a hat are crafted to perfection. She used beading decorations, an explosion of textures and eye-catching details to further her hat designs.
A recent project with beads gave her the incentive to work the whole brim of a bowler hat with petite, Miyuki beads that create an exquisite pattern. Nothing is left to chance; she plans and carries out her ideas with precision and an eye for detail. After accomplishing this, she followed up by beading a white denim jacket.
Her inspirations come from her keen eye for detail.
She loves the boater shape and bought one from London from the renowned milliner Yuan Li in a stunning black hat with dramatic wraps of colour created exquisitely round the crown and brim in an original form. This Sinamay hat inspired Lee to even more design creations of own.
Her aim is to explore details and add drama in so many ways. A painted hat with her own pattern and choice of exacting colours is a dream come true. But this was not enough, she has the artist paint and mirror the pattern on the underside of the brim giving glamour and colour from all angles. Even the black painted outline looked like stitching.
...add drama in so many ways.
In the Florida climate, a hat must be light weight and offer cool protection from the sun. Lee described and shared her turquoise boater. Having feather trims designed to her individual specification makes the hat so special. Not all her ideas go to plan. When she wore ostrich feathers to the beach the results were less than glamourous as the feathers had their very own, ‘bad hair day’! An irreversible frizz destroyed the feathers. Unperturbed, Lee ordered some more feathers and now wears the hat indoors to restaurants and occasions not on the water.
Her hat collection is vast. Her pièce de résistance was to share her hat with a wooden brim. Custom crafted by artist Dapper Renaissance, she selected a dark Mexican bicote wood for the brim.
The artist carved and planned the brim to sympathetically bring the wood grain to life. This creative brim is further embellishments with acrylic formations to accentuate the harmony of the grain patterns with vivid colours. These brims are connected with soft hand-crafted crowns to form hats that are truly one of a kind.
Carving and planning the brims to sympathetically bringing the wood grain to life.
Lee wears hats and generates new and exciting images as she coordinates her treasured hats with outfits and additional accessories. The possibilities are endless. She gives us all a lift today’s embellishing our own hats.
Lee is an inspiration for hat enhancement.
See some of her hat collection below...
If you like the beading style on Lee Innocenti's hats, you can head to our How to blog and learn how to create this style for yourself. Find it here...