I have spent the last few months juggling my “usual” benchwork (contemporary bespoke fine bindings), parenting my two daughters over the school summer holidays, running our three busy holiday lets, plus making LOTS more crinoline wigs! My studio has been worked hard with all the space utilised…
~ My studio hard at work over the summer of 2025
As many people know I used to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I was employed as a Mount-making Technician for eight years between 2008 and 2014 and have many fond memories of my time working there. Through my degree in Three-Dimensional Crafts at Brighton University and later my employment at the museum taught me know to work in a multitude of different materials (wood, metal, ceramics, plastics and fabric to name just a few) and that, plus being surrounded by beautiful craft objects, has inspired much of my bookbinding work since.
~ The Victoria and Albert Museum in London
I have always been a keen maker and adaptable with new materials. I am a visual thinker and am quite adept at understanding spatial relationships, distances, and how objects fit together. Apparently these are the kind of skills that help creating wigs from crinoline (there certainly has been a lot of creativity involved to bring component parts together to create cohesive styles) as I have spent a lot of time doing so over the last few months. Since I left the museum in 2014 I have worked on a number of wigs and head adornments for various exhibitions including: paper hair flowers for Frida Kahlo; a series of Japanese wigs; a crazy Paco Rabanne headdress; and more recently a sleek Naomi Campbell hairstyle.
I had never worked with milliner’s crinoline before 2020, when I was first commissioned to make eleven Japanese-inspired wigs for the “Kimonos: Kyoto to Catwalk” exhibition at the V&A Museum. Millinery crinoline, also called horsehair braid or crin, is a stiff yet flexible synthetic netting used in hat making to create volume and shape. Made from modern polypropylene or nylon, it comes in various types, including plain, pleated, and tubular, and is known for holding its shape for making bases, swooping shapes, and adding decorative flair to hats and fascinators.
For this entirely project I used only 15cm wide crinoline to make up all the styles (apart from a bit of the pleated crin towards the very end of the project which will be explained later in this post). Although different widths are available, they weren’t available for all the colours. As there were multiple wigs in each style in different colours I opted to just use the wide crinolin so that each would look the same on completion.
I have previously written a series of blog posts about my work on a number of projects with this very weird and wonderful material and have recently decided that I have enough projects of this nature to justify a new section on my website, called “Wigs and Head Adornments”, which I have just set up and you can see it here. This blog post will however concentrate on my most recent commission for a larger series of wigs for the V&A exhibition, “Marie Antoinette Style”, which opens on the 20th September 2025 and has been keeping me very busy recently.
The “Marie Antoinette Style” exhibition is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) first major exhibition on the French Queen , running in London from September 20, 2025, exploring her impact on fashion and design. The exhibition features over 250 objects, including loans from Versailles, Queen Antoinette’s personal belongings like slippers and jewels, and contemporary fashion pieces by designers such as Chanel and Dior. It will also include costumes from Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette and immersive elements like a scent experience and audiovisual installations.
~ The V&A’s The “Marie Antoinette Style” exhibition running from 22nd September 2025 – 22nd March 2026
I was first contacted formally about this job in April 2025, although there had been mention of the work through word-of-mouth ahead of this. The brief was to create twenty seven (yes you read that correctly: 27!) ‘Marie Antoinette’ style wigs for September 2025. I started by sending an initial estimate of costs for these, which was further edited once I received more information about the type of hairstyles they wanted to mimic.
I don’t confess to knowing much about Marie Antoinette (although I have watched the two series of the BBC’s dramatisation of her life recently and studied the wigs constructed for that!). She popularised several extravagant Rococo hairstyles, most famously the towering pouf and the hedgehog-like “hérisson”. These elaborate styles often featured extensions, scaffolding, powder, and decorative objects. We know what hairstyles she wore thanks to period artworks like paintings and fashion prints, historical descriptions from witnesses like Mary Frampton and records of the influential hairdresser Léonard Autié, who styled her hair. These sources detail her extravagant towering pouf styles, adorned with decorations like feathers and small models of ships to represent political themes, which were often powdered with flour.
The twenty seven wigs commissioned were further broken down into seven different categories and I was sent reference images relating to each:
Towering Elaborate Wigs (six of these)
Soft Curl Wigs (five of these)
Curled Wigs (two of these)
Soft Wigs (two of these)
Grace Kelly Wig (one of these)
Moschino Wigs (five of these)
Contemporary Head Treatments (seven of these)
This write up will be a whistle-stop tour of how I worked on these wigs rather than a step-by step guide of how they were made. Crinoline is a unique fabric in the sense you can make all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes with it which is excellent for building up different styles. It is however quite difficult to photograph, and I have lost track of how many of the styles were built up as they were pinned in place, then altered again then pinned before the crin was fixed in position with threads…only to then go on and add additional layers on top. I had to buy lots more pins to help me – the best pins I found were actually corsage pins as the faux pearl head was good as it didn’t slip through the mesh of the crin and they are also quite long.
The job required sending images of work in progress to the museum as I went to check they were happy with how the wigs were coming together, and as a result I have a computer absolutely full of reference images to sift through as I write this. It will be hard to select the ones to share, as much time and effort went into making the component parts for each wig and constructing them.
There were three types of mannequin head for the exhibition: an ‘abstract’ fibreglass head; a papier mâché head; and a 3D printed head made to look like the face Marie Antoinette. The 3D printed head was the largest of the three (you can see a detail of the printed base in the below right image) and was reserved for the contemporary objects, and therefore for the contemporary (and generally more colourful!) wigs. I was also sent some extra heads to use too, as I felt it would be useful when it came to working on multiples of one style. The front three heads in the below left image were to be used in the exhibition, and the back two the spares.
The list I had been sent showed which mannequin heads were required for each wig. This was important to know as the base of each wig was to be a frame made of Rigilene, and these were therefore different sizes depending upon which head they were going to sit on.
My first task was making up the frames. Rigilene is a flexible, lightweight boning made of woven polyester, ideal for providing soft structure and shape to garments like corsets and wedding dresses. I bought a whole reel and initially cut the lengths I needed for the circumferences of the mannequin heads, including enough for an overlap of about 15mm. I clipped them in the correct place with small grips, and then drilled small holes through both layers using a Dremel. The two pieces of Rigilene were then sewn together with white thread. Two extra pieces of Rigilene were then cut to size and fitted to the base band in a cross across the mannequin head. They were fixed in the same way by sewing through small holes.
As some of the wigs were going to be made from black crin I covered the frames in black bias binding strips using small stitches as I didn’t want a white frame to be visible under the crinoline. At the time it didn’t occur to me that you could buy Rigilene that was black in colour rather than white which may have saved some time – I’ll have to remember that for next time!
Due to the flexible nature of the crinoline it was possible to make lots of different shapes and bend and fix it in different ways so that I could make different component parts for each of the wigs. As I progress on with this write-up you will read the names I devised for different crinoline creations including: “rosettes”; “tight twisted rosettes”; “tubes”; “losenge tubes”; “gathered flurries”: and plain old “flat sheets”!
From this point on I am going to break down the work into the seven wig types, which is how I have tried to categorise the images I took through the process. Although I worked on the different styles alongside each other, there were clear distinctions about which was which and I tried to keep them separate in my studio so as not to get mixed up myself!
The brief for this style was: “Plenty of height, curls at the back and curly ponytails”
The reference images show Marie Antoinette with a
Crinoline, once cut, frays. For each and every piece if crinoline used I therefore tucked over the cut end, bunched it together into a bundle and secured it by winding thread around a number of times. Funnily enough I realised that this method gave the appearance of a dog’s nose, especially in the black crinoline! The below left image shows this (I think the sheen of the crinoline only adds to the effect: do you agree?!) and the left hand image shows strips of crinoline with the ends gathered. I felt it important to do this the whole way through the project as the woven nature of the materials means it is perfect for frayed ends to poke through and I didn’t want this to happen on the outer layers of the wigs and ruin the effect.
For the taller wigs, such as these ones (and later in this blog post the Pastel Moschino wigs), I added extra Rigilene boning onto the frames to help add extra height. This was in turn covered in dress netting “pads” to cover the frame and give a decent base upon which to attach the crinoline layers. Some of the wigs were to have object hats attached to them once at the museum too, so I was mindful of this when making them.
~ Adding height to the frame with extra Rigilene for the taller wigs
I made up a series of component parts for each of the three black Towering Elaborate wigs, which took over one entire bench in my studio, as you can partly see in the below left image. I pinned the component parts in place with the corsage pins on top of the dress netting and took images as I went to remind me how they were put together as I knew I also had three ivory coloured wigs of the same style to make too. The below centre and right images show a series of tubes being lined up on the very front face of the wig to form a striking and sheer front to the wigs.
The back of the wigs were rather crazier! The 15cm wide crinoline I was using came supplied with a long piece of thread woven into one side. I largely removed this when making the wigs however it did have a purpose and was useful in some applications. I was able to create “gathered flurries” by pulling the threaded edge at both ends of the crin strip which pulled in the crin. Each wig required 11 gathered flurries, so they were tied and secured and were then able to be used to create volume and height at the back top of the wigs.
Until pulled down with additional stitches they certainly looked quite wild as you can see below!
The base of the wig at the back was made up of large “rosettes” of crin, built up in rows to fill the space down from the gathered flurries to the base of the neck. The curators considered adding extra adornments to these wigs using feathers, pearls and flowers. I did a test pin of these however time was running too short for a decision to be made as I had to post them to the museum ahead of going away on holiday for two weeks. I was instructed to post the adornments back loose, along with the wigs, so they could discuss it further and attach them in-house at the museum if required. In the end, it was decided that they wouldn’t be used but I enjoyed playing around with them none-the-less.
~ Pinning the adornments onto the black Towering Elaborate wigs
And so I had to repeat the whole of the process for the three ivory wigs in the same style! I had cut and prepped all the strips of ivory crin I needed for the various elements and made little post-it notes so I knew which pile was which. I was generally working on wigs concurrently so the wig you see atop the bench in the below picture was one of the “soft” wigs which I am yet to write about.
~ The organised piles of ivory crinoline for the Towering Elaborate wigs
For the ivory wigs I took some photographs of the “rosettes” I mentioned previously. Strips of crin were doubled over, coiled and then the two loose ends of the crin band were fixed: one pushed through the middle of the coil and the other on the outside of the coil (as you can see pinched between my fingers in the below left image). Each wig needed fourteen of these so I made 42 of them (or 84 is you count the black wigs too!).
They were attached to the base of the back of the wig and then the gathered flurries were attached on top before being tied down to tame the shape.
What I didn’t speak about when describing how the black versions of the this style were made, was the ringlet ponytails. I did a few tests of how this could be done and received feedback from the museum about required changes. As the reference images showed them to be quite long and snaking from the base of the hairline down across the shoulder I wanted them to be pliable so that Textiles Conservation could bend them into the desired shape at the museum.
With this in mind I used wire to create ringlets of different lengths, bending it around a wooden pole. The ends of the wire were coiled into a ring so that I could attach a base material to either end and it wouldn’t move.
Strips of dress netting were then attached at one end (see below left image) and wound around the wire ringlet before also being secured at the other end with thread (see below middle image). I then created a tube of crinoline that was sewn over the top. In the below right image you can see two iterations of the ringlet, both had further changes made before I was ready to make multiples.
At the museum an extra layer of heat-coiled crin was also added over the top of these to further define the ringlets – this is not evident on the completed images of this style on my website as these changes were made after they left my studio.
One of the ivory wigs was to be adorned with a Antoiette’s “ship hat”. Marie Antoinette wore an elaborate “ship hat” or coiffure à la Belle Poule to celebrate a French naval victory at the Battle of Ushant in 1778, turning her hairstyle into a patriotic statement of French triumph. These towering, themed hairstyles, created by her milliner Rose Bertin, were a major fashion trend, reflecting current events, political allegiances, and cultural trends, though they were also satirised for their extravagance.
My working list also included a “prop ship hat” – how exciting! Sadly, like the pearls, feathers and flowers this was not used but it was fun to work on and I wanted to share images of it none-the-less.
Here you can see the three ivory wigs waiting their turn for installation. I am looking forward to seeing these on the mannequins in the exhibition and hope to be able to update my website with some images of them in the galleries in the not too distant future.
To see more images of these completed wigs please visit the “Wigs and Head Adornments” section of my website here.
The brief for this style was to appear like Grace Kelly’s hair in the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock film, To Catch a Thief. The extravagant gown was a key part of her character Frances Stevens’s outfit for a masquerade ball.
Grace Kelly embodies a similar style to Marie Antoinette at a masquerade ball in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film, To Catch a Thief, where she wears a voluminous, gold mesh ball gown adorned with fabric birds and a matching wig, evoking the lavish court of the French queen. The costume, a “fairy princess” creation by Edith Head for the Cote d’Azur mansion ball, featured a grand scale and opulent detailing, mirroring the extravagance of Marie Antoinette’s era and the extravagant nature of her character as a wealthy American heiress.
To see more images of this completed wig please visit the “Wigs and Head Adornments” section of my website here.
The brief for this style was to mimic some extravagant wigs that adorned the catwalk during the fashion brand Moschino’s Fall/Winter 2020 (AW20) ready-to-wear collection, designed by then-Creative Director Jeremy Scott. The collection offered a satirical, modern take on the extravagance of the 18th-century French court, contrasting the opulence of Versailles with contemporary fashion elements.
To see more images of these completed wigs please visit the “Wigs and Head Adornments” section of my website here.
The brief for this final group was vague: “Small head treatment for the contemporary objects that tie in with the wigs. Curls were the preferred inspiration from the curators.”
To see more images of these completed wigs please visit the “Wigs and Head Adornments” section of my website here.
