Take your hat off to her

• Published date: 16 November 2023
• Publication title: Mountain Scene

Turns out her wig head-piece, along with her costume, were made by milliner Nicola Gredziuk, who’d arrived in the resort from Australia a year prior

Though she’s made hundreds of hats and been trained by renowned Melbourne milliners, Gredziuk’s really only been a sporadic milliner and costume designer.

Originally from Mosgiel, near Dunedin, she moved to Australia when she was just two as her dad was a resources industry engineer.

Her high school years were in Adelaide, where she bought a hat from ‘‘a really trendy shop’’.

‘‘It ended up being hideous, and I thought ‘I’ve spent all this money on it, I’m going to remake it’.

‘‘I did, and I had people on the street going, ‘Where did you get hat from?’’’

At 18 or 19, Gredziuk moved to Perth and was employed as a business analyst in the oil and gas industry.

In ’96, however, she moved to Melbourne for two years and took lessons from renowned milliner, Waltraud Reiner, and learnt wire-frame work from another ‘‘amazing’’ milliner, Louise Macdonald.

She then had a year in London where she studied fashion and learned to make fabric flowers.

Back in Perth, she continued in the corporate world, but now and then ‘‘I’d sort of crack the shits and go off in a huff and feel I needed to do something creative’’.

‘‘I really only dabbled at being a working milliner, and, when I did do it, I didn’t find it that satisfying mainly because it’s really hard to get clients who let me be original.

‘‘They would normally come to you with a photograph of something they’ve seen in a magazine.’’

Gredziuk, who also studied fashion design and textiles in Perth, did, however, collect about 1700 vintage wooden hat blocks — ‘‘I found it really hard to go past antique shops and not buy blocks’’.

After the birth of her daughter, who’s now 19, she thought about becoming a draughtsperson before going to woodwork school to learn to make her own hat blocks.

‘‘I got a bit sidetracked and made furniture for a little bit instead.’’

She says there’d have been little millinery work in Perth, anyway — ‘‘the racing industry’s not that big there, and people don’t understand millinery like they do in Melbourne’’.

‘‘I would do the odd hat for Melbourne Cup but that was it, so I started to do bridal [work].

‘‘But I just couldn’t stand the clients...