Dressed: The History of Fashion · Dressed Media

The Art of Historical Hatmaking with Rachel Frost (Dressed Classic)

March 14, 2026·54 min·5 clips

Rachel Frost is reviving a 16th-century hat-making technique lost for over 150 years.

1. Dressed: The History of Fashion hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary interview Rachel Frost, a self-taught traditional hatter and historian based in the Edinburgh countryside of Scotland. 2. Rachel Frost is described as one of very few practitioners globally using a European historical felt hat-making technique; she has worked with the V&A, Hampton Court, the Globe, and the BBC's Tudor Monastery Farm series. 3. The episode explores how Rachel taught herself a craft with almost no surviving documentation, treating it as a combination of archival research, museum study, and experimental archaeology. 4. Rachel trained as a model maker for animation and worked at Jim Henson's Creature Shop before deliberately redirecting her career toward rural traditional crafts. 5. A book given to her as a gift introduced her to felt-making; she gathered wool from nearby fences to make a crude first hat and was struck by the process of turning raw fleece into a wearable object. 6. The European felt hat-making technique she studies died out in Britain approximately 150 years ago and was never written down in detail; Rachel reconstructed it from manuscript fragments, tool illustrations, and surviving hats in museum collections. 7. Surviving museum hats date back to the 16th century and were often not typical items — many were concealed in building roofs as good-luck objects — so she learned to interpret them carefully as data points rather than representative examples. 8. The bow carder — a seven-foot gut-stringed bow plucked with a small stick — is the key tool Rachel rebuilt from manuscript illustrations; when vibrated, it launches wool fibers into the air, creating the random alignment needed for smooth, even felt. 9. Mastering the bow carder was Rachel's personal turning point: her hats only began matching the museum examples she admired after she built and learned to use a full-scale version, based partly on freeze-framing a 1970s video of a Hungarian hat-maker. 10. Felting is performed on a hot plate with steam, physically rubbing the fibers with bare hands — a process Rachel describes as working in a sauna, and one she notes has left her with numerous burns. 11. Dyeing is most effective when done at a mid-point in the felting process, not at the raw fleece stage or after full felting: a discovery Rachel made during a study trip to Mexico where hat-makers showed her their technique. 12. Most historical hats were black, but black is achieved through multiple over-dyeing stages using natural dyes — logwood, iron mordants — following medieval recipes that Rachel has found in written references. 13. In addition to felt hats, Rachel weaves hats from rushes (Scirpus lacustris) gathered from rivers, and created a full-scale wearable 1860s coat woven from Thames rushes as a sculptural piece based on a period costume book pattern. 14. Rachel works with historical reenactors across Britain, describing them as a community that values knowing how an object was made as much as the object itself, and crediting them with sustaining her ability to keep making and learning. 15. She has collaborated with the Tudor Tailors on a decade-long project to reconstruct and document Tudor knitted caps, including writing the knitting pattern for a book due out at time of recording. 16. Rachel demonstrates her craft in full 16th-century attire at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Sussex, an open-air museum that reconstructed an original 15th-century shop nearly identical to one depicted in her historical illustrations. 17. The two last European practitioners of this specific felt hat-making technique — one in Hungary, one in Austria — both died in recent years, prompting Rachel to search globally via YouTube and Instagram for surviving practitioners. 18. Rachel crowdfunded a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, to visit Lucino Martinez, 78, the last traditional felt hat-maker in a town that once had hundreds; Rachel describes meeting him as the first hat-maker she had ever physically met, with tears shed on both sides. 19. Listeners who enjoy the intersection of material culture, craft revival, and historical archaeology, or who follow reenactment and living history communities, will find this episode particularly engaging. 20. Those looking for broader fashion trend coverage or contemporary industry discussion will find the episode's focus on pre-industrial craft technique too specialized.

As heard by us

A measured look at hatmaking, with enough craft detail to keep it grounded.

Rachel Frost comes through as a self taught traditional hatter and historian, and the episode keeps that work rooted in archives and museum collections rather than in easy nostalgia.

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Why you'd press play

For the listener who wants Rachel Frost's historical hatmaking methods in close-up.

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