Craftsmanship
Maison Michel
There is an atelier in Paris that shapes, by hand, the hats your favourite designer sends down a runway during Fashion Week, and the ones you try on quietly at Le Shop 17, in Cannes. It's the same one.
Maison Michel was born in 1936, when Auguste Michel set up his hat workshop on rue Sainte-Anne. Ninety years on, the house has never left its trade: giving one shape, and only one, to a piece of felt or straw, and making it last.
What has changed since is who comes knocking. Since 1997, that's also been Chanel.
In 1997, Maison Michel officially joined Chanel's Métiers d'art, the constellation of workshops that the house on rue Cambon acquires and protects so it never loses the craft skills behind its collections. Around the table: Lesage for embroidery, Lemarié for feathers and the camellia, Massaro for hand-stitched shoes, Goossens for metalwork and jewellery. Maison Michel brings the hat, and only the hat, but the whole of it.
The arrangement is a clever one: each atelier keeps its own name, its own address, its own outside clients, and keeps selling under its own name. Maison Michel didn't become a Chanel line, it stayed Maison Michel, with one difference: it never again had to choose between surviving and passing on its craft.
The gesture no machine can copy
A Maison Michel hat passes through three pairs of hands before it's finished. The formier (hat-block maker) selects, from a stock of several thousand wooden blocks built up since 1936, the one that will give the model its silhouette. The chapelier (hat maker) steams the felt or straw, stretches it over the block, brushes it, presses it, until the material agrees to stay exactly where it's told. The modiste (trimmer) then adds the ribbon, the trim, the lining — the final touch that signs the piece.
None of it can be automated, or sped up. That's also why, in March 2021, when Chanel gathered several of its Métiers d'art under one roof in Aubervilliers, at Le19M, Maison Michel installed its own hat-block workshop there: the raw material of the trade, quite literally, deserves a roof of its own.
Since 2015, the house's artistic direction has been in the hands of Priscilla Royer, who trained at Studio Berçot and worked at Vivienne Westwood in London before founding her own label. Her signature: taking the hat out of its reputation as an intimidating, occasion-only piece, multiplying its uses, its materials, its brim heights, so it becomes something worn every day, not just on your wedding day.
What that means when you try one on
In practical terms, this means one simple thing: the quality of a Maison Michel felt hat is something you can feel under your fingers, in how the brim holds its line, in how it springs back into shape after a trip in your bag. That's not a marketing line, it's the direct result of a felt steamed and shaped by hand rather than moulded on a production line.
Everything else is decided at the fitting, never from a photo. Sizes run from S to L, but no two faces wear the same shape the same way: it all depends on the oval of the face, the line of the shoulders, the angle at which the brim cuts across your eyeline. It's also why a hat is best chosen in store, with someone on hand to tell you whether it needs tilting one more centimetre. For a festive dinner or an evening out in Cannes, our New Year's Eve outfit guide has a few ideas for wearing one without overdoing it.
The Shop 17 selection
A selection of Maison Michel pieces available in store, chosen with the same care as the rest of the Le Shop 17 selection.
See the full Maison Michel collection
Come try one on in Cannes
The Maison Michel selection is available to see and try in store, at 15 rue Notre-Dame, 06400 Cannes, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 7pm. The Le Shop 17 team can be reached at +33 (0)4 93 39 46 46, by email at info@leshop17.com, or on WhatsApp for any question on sizing, colour or availability. Follow the boutique's news on Instagram too, @leshop17.
Also worth reading: our house profile, Maison Michel at Le Shop 17, the Paris hat house since 1936.
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