The “girl” is Andie MacDowell and she is making a grand entrance in the film that turned Grant into an international star and provided the blueprint for every subsequent British rom-com.
The hat? It transpires a Kiwi had a literal hand in its creation – but more on that (hat) later.
It was last Christmas Eve when Auckland woman Karen Lee went to Pākiri to collect the brimmed and bowed beauty she’d seen for sale online.
“This famously elegant hat by Herald & Heart, London, was first commissioned for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral,” said the listing.
“Its huge brim keeps the wearer cool and chic as illustrated by Andie MacDowell who wore it as [sic] the bride of the film’s first wedding . . . the hat is dark blue, in excellent condition and comes with its own hatbox, $150 ono.”
Jody Gill fits the restored “Four Weddings and a Funeral” hat on Karen Lee who plans to wear it on the champagne lawn at Ellerslie for Melbourne Cup Day. Photo / Alyse Wright
Lee bought it sight unseen. She loves the movie and believed, based on her reading of the listing, the hat had literally been worn by Andie MacDowell. But that wasn’t her only reason for snapping it up.
Almost 50 years earlier, at Baradene College of the Sacred Heart, Lee had become friends with the woman who would, one day, co-own Herald & Heart Hatters – the company that made the original (and now iconic) Four Weddings hat.
Andi MacDowell wears the original hat in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
“Sometimes, when something is just right, you don’t need to question it,” says Lee. “You simply know it has found its home. And that’s exactly how I feel about this hat.”
But was her hat THE hat? And, if so, how did it end up in Pākiri?
Internet searches revealed headwear fitting its description had been spotted across the United Kingdom.
A screenshot of the photograph used in a 2007 Bonhams auction catalogue for a wide-brimmed black hat listed as “Andie McDowell from Four Weddings and a Funeral”.
In 2007, at a Bonhams London auction of film and television costumes, five pieces from Four Weddings and a Funeral went under the hammer. The Andie MacDowell wide-brimmed hat fetched £3120 ($7400).
Then, just last year, the hat appeared for sale in Exeter. Auction house Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood valued it between £2000-£3000 and reported its provenance as a gift to a local elocution expert who had worked with MacDowell on the movie set.
“The hat was not sold and is sitting on a shelf behind my desk,” auctioneer Brian Goodison-Blanks told the Herald. “It may be possible that several were used during filming . . .”
If the hat doesn’t fit the story, perhaps rethink the headline?
On a Zoom call from England, New Zealand expat Robyn Allardice-Bourne is a little bit cross about the hat’s auction appearances.
“Because of course it’s on the stand back to front!”
The bow goes at the front. And she should know. Because Baradene College alumni Allardice-Bourne was one of the three women who made that hat.
Robyn Allardice-Bourne (far right) photographed at the 1995 Baftas with best actor winner Hugh Grant.
In the 1990s, Tracy Mogard, Lucy Hodges and Allardice-Bourne were Herald & Heart – so named because the latter drove a Triumph Herald and, when money was tight, the milliners wrote romances.
The company produced hats for everyone from the royal family to film stars. They sent model Naomi Campbell down the Clothes Show Live runway with headwear so big they’d intended to make the Guinness Book of Records and, at London Fashion Week, they displayed their wares on puppets from television’s Spitting Image (“as a joke, we used to call ourselves By Appointment to Her Royal Rubber Highness”).
Allardice-Bourne says Herald & Heart, which still operates today, produced the hats Glenn Close wore in 1001 Dalmatians and faithfully replicated 1930s fashion for television’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot. (The latter sent Allardice-Bourne to hospital. She was threading bugle beads when she laughed so hard she accidentally snorted a tiny tubular piece of Victorian glass up her nose. The extraction was painful and she had to explain to a doctor that bugle beads were not a new type of street drug).
An old Herald & Heart blog post recalls the company’s connection to Four Weddings and a Funeral: “Back in 1993, (was it really that long ago?) we had a call from costume designer Lindy Hemming. She and her team had been trawling the London stores looking for the right hats for the lead in a low-budget film that was about to be shot. After going through the hat departments (remember them?) in Selfridges, John Lewis, Harrods, Fenwick’s, etc. they realised that the hats they were drawn to most happened to be Herald & Heart. So they decided to contact us directly to commission a few hats for the movie. At that time we were making a lot of millinery for film and theatre, so the hats, once made, were sent, invoiced and then pretty much forgotten about …”
Original advertising for the Hugh Grant and Andie Macdowell romantic comedy Four Weddings And A Funeral – the featured hat was a variation on the one that appeared in the film.
Allardice-Bourne told the Herald the final design was “typical of the three of us working on something”. Mogard was an expert at shaping crowns,
Hodges was the queen of the bow and “I was the lazy brimmer”. She believes the team produced a sample and two replicas, but she doesn’t know what happened to them after the movie. A fourth slightly different version, was used in the movie’s advertising imagery and lives in her loft (“I think I wore it to Ascot one year?”).
“It was a lovely hat,” she says of the version MacDowell wears in the opening minutes of Four Weddings. “It was just a very simple, very easy hat to wear.”
Allardice-Bourne says Herald & Heart worked on other pieces for the film’s multiple wedding scenes, but the production budget was tight.
“I cringe actually when I watch the movie because if I’d known how popular it was going to be, I would have made more of an effort …
“They didn’t have a lot of money. Someone’s mum did the flowers, I think . . . it was all very ‘who knows who can lend us what’.
Allardice-Bourne was at the British Academy Film Awards when Four Weddings cleaned up, winning best film, actor (Hugh Grant), supporting actress (Kristin Scott Thomas) and director (Mike Newell who, in another random New Zealand connection, also directed Bad Blood, about the 1941 West Coast manhunt for mass-killer Stanley Graham).
Somewhere, says Allardice-Bourne, she has a photograph of herself on the Four Weddings set: “Sitting on a stone wall with Rowan Atkinson, who I knew anyway from the comedy lot, Simon Callow who I thought had the most beautiful voice. John Hannah was having a fag somewhere, and Hugh Grant, who no one had ever heard of, but was really sweet … we all sat there on a stone wall by one of those churches, waiting for the American movie star to arrive.”
Robyn Allardice-Bourne at Ascot Racecourse last year. In the 1990s, the London-based solictor was a co-owner of Herald & Heart, the company that made the iconic wide-brimmed black hat worn by Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Allardice-Bourne, a past president of the New Zealand Society in London, exited Herald & Heart in 1997 for a long career in the law. She says it’s most likely the Four Weddings hat purchased in Pākiri was part of a wholesale collection produced after the movie – the company’s hats were sold internationally and she remembers dealing with Smith & Caugheys in Auckland and David Jones and Myer in Australia.
“People always say you look lovely in a hat,” says Allardice-Bourne. “And that is because a hat makes you stand up straight.”
An outrageous hat is one thing, “but it’s also nice to have a dramatic hat” she says. The Four Weddings hat is, in her opinion, the latter.
“It is more of an ‘elegant dramatic’ hat. You cannot pretend you do not have a hat on when you wear it. It is definitely arriving with you.”
Back in Auckland, Karen Lee and Jody Gill concur.
“I think a hat finishes an outfit,” says Gill, who had always been interested in hat making but didn’t seriously persue her craft until Covid stranded her in Melbourne with a milliner friend.
“I was there three or four weeks. I learned how to make hats and drank a lot of cocktails!”
A hat “is a little bit of your personality coming through,” says Gill.
“When I see people at the races without hats on, I feel like they look a little bit like they’re missing something.”
Auckland milliner Jody Gill says hats complete an outfit. Photo / Alyse Wright
Gill says when Lee brought the Pākari “Four Weddings” hat to her, it was badly faded (back to a light blue with flecks of pink in some places) and had lost its shape.
“It’s quite daunting, putting a whole hat into a dye bath . . . I dipped it a few times and tried to reshape it as it dried. It wasn’t good enough, to be honest.”
She tried a different dye, custom mixing two colours and adding a special fixative (“I didn’t want any situation where, if you sweated a little bit, it was potentially going to drip down your face!”).
Last week, viewing the restored hat for the first time, Lee described Gill’s work as “magic”.
And, while it turned out her hat had never been to the movies, it would definitely still be going to the races – in celebration and acknowledgement of the friend Lee made back in Form Two when a teacher seated her next to Allardice-Bourne.
“I’m incredibly proud of Robyn and all that she has achieved. So when I saw this hat advertised, I felt compelled to buy it. Not so much because of its pedigree, but because I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate my friend.
“Restoring the hat so that it could become my hat for Ellerslie on Melbourne Cup Day felt like the natural thing to do,” Lee says.
“Ultimately, its history and pedigree are not the most important things to me … how wonderful in a way that the hat became so iconic that it was commercially produced. I’ll still wear it with pride.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.