According to award-winning milliner Giulia Mio, more people should embrace the hat. Not as costume. Not as trend. But as punctuation – the final mark that turns an outfit into a sentence worth reading.
From her light-filled studio in Leicester, this passionate and inspiring milliner has built a reputation for hats that don’t shout, but speak. Each one is a one-off, shaped by hand, story, and instinct. “I’m not the fashion police,” she says quickly, with a laugh. “I appreciate everybody’s style. How they want to look, how they want to feel.”
Picture credit: Pukaar News
That philosophy sits at the heart of her work. Born and trained in Italy, Giulia studied costume design at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she learned that clothes are never just clothes. They are narrative devices. Colour, texture, proportion – all tools for storytelling. Millinery arrived almost by accident, during a chaotic final-year Master’s project for opera. While everything else felt frantic, hats felt natural. Fabric draped easily in her hands. Shapes made sense. A tutor noticed. A door opened.
From there came specialist millinery training in Switzerland and Rome, then years working in Milan producing hats for theatre, opera and ballet. But repetition bored her. Forty identical hats for a chorus? Impossible. Giulia wanted detail, craftsmanship, couture – pieces where embroidery, hand-dyeing and traditional techniques could breathe. Hats that were closer to art than accessory.
Picture credit: Pukaar News
That instinct eventually brought her to the UK, following her partner’s academic career first to Oxford, then to Leicester, where Giulia has been based since 2015. What began as small commissions – brides, mothers of the bride, racegoers – grew into a full practice rooted in bespoke design. Today, her hats are worn at Royal Ascot, weddings, exhibitions, and have even been acquired by museums overseas.
So what makes Giulia Mio stand out?
“I don’t like repeating myself,” she says simply.
Her collections – if they can be called that – don’t expire. She doesn’t chase trends or colour-of-the-year diktats. Inspiration comes instead from mood, palette, and curiosity. A blush pink with a whisper of yellow. A sharp, unexpected purple. Summer collections take precedence, fuelled by Britain’s racegoing culture, where hats are still allowed to be joyful, dramatic, unapologetic.
Here, the hat becomes less about spectacle and more about intention. Giulia is careful to remind clients that bold doesn’t have to mean loud. A hat can whisper just as effectively as it sings. “It could be a tiny teardrop shape, a button, a headband,” she explains.
“Something very small can completely lift an outfit out of dullness.”
What matters is proportion, balance, and – crucially – how the wearer inhabits it. The wrong scale can overwhelm; the right one can feel transformative.
Every client experience begins the same way: conversation. Tea. Cake. Trying on plain, untrimmed shapes. Giulia sketches as she talks, offering two or three designs tailored to the wearer’s face, proportions and personality. She is honest – sometimes brutally so. “If a shape makes you look like a mushroom,” she shrugs, “I’ll tell you. Unless your goal is to look like the greatest mushroom on earth!”
That directness is softened by care. Giulia believes hats demand trust and collaboration. She sends work-in-progress photographs, checks in at key moments, and adjusts colour or scale as the piece evolves. Each hat takes time – an average of three and a half days – while couture and exhibition pieces can require weeks of uninterrupted labour.
Picture credit: Giulia Mio
This sensitivity may stem from her background as a dancer. Giulia reads bodies instinctively – posture, movement, confidence – often before a word is spoken. Her studio in Leicester’s Maker’s Yard is designed as a safe space, free from judgement, where trying on hats becomes a form of quiet self-discovery. Some clients arrive certain, others anxious. Both leave smiling.
Underlying it all is a quiet mission: confidence. “Hats frame the face,” Giulia says. “That’s why they scare people. All the attention goes there.” But that attention, she believes, can be empowering. In an age of fashion homogenisation and algorithm-driven sameness, a hat becomes a gentle rebellion.
For Giulia, a hat is never just a hat. It’s a mood. A boundary. A conversation starter. A shield on a bad day, a crown on a good one. Some days she hides under a beanie. Others, she reaches for turbans, trilbies, or soft vintage veiling that brushes the skin like a secret.
Picture credit: Giulia Mio
“Hats make me feel myself,” she says. “And that changes every day.”
So if the hat fits, wear it. Not because it’s fashionable. Not because everyone else is. But because, for a moment, it helps you stand a little taller, feel a little more you. And in Giulia Mio’s world, that’s always in style.
For more information about Giulia’s latest collection, visit: www.giuliamiomillinery.com
