For the past 25 years, Rosie has been hatting the heads of Australia's leading performers on stage, screen, in television, opera and ballet. Her headwear has travelled the world as productions like La Boheme and The King and I have toured Broadway. Or as iconic films like Moulin Rouge and The Piano – both Oscar winning and nominated for costumes – have screened in cinemas around the globe, as has the recent Australia, which she hatted for principal cast and hundreds of extras, and other notables like Peter Pan, Oscar and Lucinda and Babe, Pig in the City.
Since Cats in 1984, Rosie has created a sweep of headwear for every blockbuster musical in the southern hemisphere. She has consistently produced character headwear for major Australian theatre and opera companies, and created historical headwear replicas for museums, and made multiple headdresses for the Olympic Games.
. — Rosie Boylan,
Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August 2008
Her couture millinery has been commissioned by Australian fashion designers, and under her own label she continues to produce fashion headwear. See chronology for a full list of Rosie's film and theatrical credits, fashion millinery, museum replicas and arena headwear.
The future.
In 2010 Rosie will advance her production range of men's streetwear and couture hat designs.
′I like the clean lines and confident profile that men's hats convey.′ says Rosie. 'With twists and tweaks in form and scale, a hat can balance the male silhouette so proudly.'
′Men are now resurrecting the hat as a cultural identifier of difference and personal styling,′ she adds. ′It's a new era for the hat.′ Rosie was awarded the prestigious Churchill Fellowship to study men's headwear and hat design in Japan, Italy, the UK and New York in early 2009. Following her international exploration into men’s hat design, Rosie has now extended her practice to include the styling, making and selling of contemporary men’s and women's hats from her studio in Newtown.
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But in the beginning...
Rosie, believing she was a displaced princess from another world, grew up on Biscuit Flat in rural South Australia during the 1960s.
The isolation fostered a fertile imagination in the young Rosie, who developed a very independent spirit and view of the world – indulging fantasies of fashion with her beloved but blonde Barbie, and playing the prima ballerina to a crackly Swan Lake on the back lawn.
She absorbed style through her bejewelled and eccentric old aunts as they devoured devonshire teas on sun-dappled verandahs.
Rosie loved the weekend theatrics of the Latin Mass, where she observed diverse characters parading their Sunday best outfits, topped by the mandatory hat. These were the dying days of ensemble dressing. And the hat was sinking, too, as a relic of starched mid-twentieth century fashion.
Still, as she rode on the fleece of the 60s wool boom in rural Australia, where everyone dressed in sturdy tweeds, Rosie developed a keen sense for nature and the sheer wonders of natural fibres, their textures and patterns.
...and then it was the call of theatrical otherworlds
Leaving the rural life behind, Rosie was drawn to the theatre where she could indulge in the exotic otherworldly narratives and characters she had always imagined.
She met Betty Viazim, the doyen of 20th century Australian millinery, and was given a scholarship to learn from the master. ′Betty convinced me hats had a magical quality that could transform people. She really put a spell on me.′ While the rest of the headwear industry were hanging up their hats and retiring, Rosie, in her singular enthusiasm, was buying up and storing their old wares.
Rosie had found her calling, making a broad sweep of character headwear for the stage and screen over the next two decades.
But in between, there's always an intrigue with Indigenous traditions Always interested in the cultural contexts of head adornments, Rosie has travelled extensively – to the Pacific to observe straw-weaving traditions in Vanuatu, to Ecuador to witness the panama hat industry in its contemporary evolution, and to India to study turban-wearing. On home ground she has explored coiled basket weaving with Narranjerri Aboriginal women in South Australia's Coorong, and flax weaving with Maori women.
