Javier Reta Gallego & Myrte Sara Huyts

Maleza hatmakers

Milliner

©MALEZA hatmakers

Love for hats

Javier and Myrte’s create hats in felt and vegetable fibres
Their pieces are unique and custom made
They work with antique tools

Javier Reta Gallego and Myrte Sara Huyts are a couple whose passion is hat-making. He, a Spaniard, comes from a background in Fine Arts and graphic design. Whereas Myrte, who is Dutch, comes from a family of musicians, and studied literature and philology. It all started in 2017, in an apartment in the Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapiés. There, several factors came together: the love for hats, the desire to make something with their own hands, the desire to do something without haste, recreating in the small details and the curiosity for history, cultures and traditions. Their workshop officially opened in 2019. Currently, they make genderless hats, always worked with a wooden hat block, handmade, one by one. Most of their antique hat blocks come from a milliner in La Mancha, who lived in a small town almost 200km from Madrid.

Interview

©MALEZA hatmakers

©MALEZA hatmakers

How did the name of your workshop come about?: Maleza, or "weeds", refers to the wild, to the spontaneous, to something impossible to tame. We fell in love with the primitive and we constantly revisit the origins of form to find the germ of our most contemporary designs. We moved away from the solemnity that has frozen the hat in time for so long, and instead we aim at imitating nature in its processes by rescuing, redesigning and reusing in a cyclical way.
What do you enjoy most about your profession?: The workshop is everything for us. It's that place you want to come to in the morning to see how the felts have dried on the lasts, if it matches that trimming you put on last-minute yesterday, to make sure that that 19th-century tool is there, greeting you when you arrive and it wasn't part of a dream.
It's like time travel, isn't it?: That time machine is also where we invite customers who want a custom hat. We measure their head with a "conformateur", a tool that comes from Paris and dates back to the mid-19th century, which gives us the exact size and is used to create a detailed plan of the skull.
Is there any secret of your profession that people don't know?: Many people are unaware that there is a huge quantity of unused felt hats from the days when hats were worn on a daily basis. It takes a long time to take these antique hats apart and wash them, taking away their initial shape and turning them into hat bodies. But it is possible to make hats from upcycled felt; the quality and colours from almost a century ago are stunning. Most of our “one of a kind” hats are made like this.

Javier Reta Gallego & Myrte Sara Huyts are rising stars: they began their career in 2017