Women's accessories - 'rio negro' hat

The hat ‘rio negro‘ was created as part of the exhibition series Circulation in the Circle, launched by the Contemporary Design Department in 2018. According to the concept, the invited designer will select an object or ensemble of objects from the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, and will create a new design as inspired by the object(s). The third designer we invited for the series is Valéria Fazekas, milliner living in Budapest. Upon receiving the invitation from the museum, the designer selected an ornamental vessel from the Zsolnay Factory and another from the Drasche Factory. The element that inspired the ‘rio negro’ hat was the attachment of the ears of the vase to its mouth. In this case, the base of the hat is provided by two circular discs – not for the first time in Fazekas’s oeuvre – but this time she started and finished the stitching of the hat in different places, which offered her the possibility for countless versions to experiment with. The hat is made of cotton, and when it is rotated just a few degrees on one’s head, such radically different versions are created that it is as if each were a completely different hat. In this case, half of the face is obscured, but the eye is visible through an opening. The ribbons are sometimes reminiscent of tongues sticking out of mouths, but at the same time, there is a kind of raffish elegance that is discernible in the piece.