A wide-brimmed navy hat listed on Facebook Marketplace for $150 in Pākiri, north of Auckland, turned out to have one of the strangest backstories in New Zealand racing-season fashion. Auckland woman Karen Lee bought it on Christmas Eve believing it was the actual hat Andie MacDowell wears in the first wedding scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral. The truth is more tangled — and arguably better.
The 1994 film's famous headwear was made by Herald & Heart, a London millinery house founded by three women, one of them Kiwi expat Robyn Allardice-Bourne, an old school friend of Lee's from Baradene College. Costume designer Lindy Hemming commissioned the hats after noticing that everything she liked in Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis came from the same small workshop. Allardice-Bourne, who styled brims ('I was the lazy brimmer'), believes the team made a sample plus two replicas — so multiple versions exist, and nobody can say exactly where they all went.
Two of those versions have surfaced at UK auctions. A MacDowell wide-brim sold at Bonhams in London in 2007 for £3,120 (about NZ$7,400), and another appeared last year at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood in Exeter, valued at £2,000-£3,000, with provenance linking it to an elocution coach who worked with MacDowell on set. That one never sold — it's reportedly still on the auctioneer's shelf. Lee's Pākiri hat, Allardice-Bourne suspects, was most likely part of a later wholesale run; Herald & Heart hats were stocked by Smith & Caughey's in Auckland and by David Jones and Myer in Australia.
None of that dimmed the romance for Lee. She had the badly faded hat — sun-bleached to pale blue with pink flecks — restored by Auckland milliner Jody Gill, who custom-mixed two dyes, added a sweat-proof fixative and reshaped it by hand. It will be on Lee's head at Ellerslie Racecourse on Melbourne Cup Day, worn in tribute to the friend she was seated next to in Form Two.
The wider story is a nice reminder for race-day dressers: hats carry histories, and a good milliner can resurrect one you found second-hand. Allardice-Bourne, who left the business in 1997 for a law career, also offers a fitting philosophy — 'a hat makes you stand up straight', and this one, she says, is elegantly dramatic: it definitely arrives with you. Her old company went on to make hats for the royal family, Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians and the Poirot television series, so if you spot a striking brim at the fields this spring, it may have more provenance than you think.
For travellers and racegoers, the takeaway is simple: Melbourne Cup Day at Ellerslie is as much about millinery as racing, second-hand listings can hide gems, and sometimes the best accessory story is the one you write yourself.
