In conversation with milliner Suz Berlin

Before there was couture, there was a hat. The straw hat predates almost everything we think of as fashion — the earliest examples were worn in ancient Egypt simply to keep the sun off, which is about as close to a universal human problem as clothing has ever solved. By the 17th century they had migrated across rural Europe, woven from whatever grew nearby. By the 19th, the boater — descended from the humble canotiers of Venetian gondoliers — had somehow become the calling card of British leisure, worn to Henley and Ascot with the same cool authority as a Homburg. The Panama hat, that great confidence trick of headwear history, was never from Panama at all: woven from toquilla palm in Ecuador since the 1500s, it earned its name by accident, sold to canal workers and Gold Rush travelers passing through on their way to somewhere else.

Susanne came to straw through an apprenticeship and a season. She is a milliner working in Berlin-Kreuzberg, in a technique so specific and so rare that it found her as much as she found it. During her training, she discovered that millinery runs on seasons: autumn and winter belong to felt, to wool and rabbit hair, the serious heavier materials. Then summer opens up, and with it an entirely different vocabulary — wheat straw, paper, palm fibre, things that were once alive and still carry some memory of a field. "I fell in love with this season in particular, and especially with wheat straw," she says. "It feels so elemental and carries such a rich history." She has been working in that season ever since, and has never looked back toward winter.

The history she's working within has had some extraordinary moments. Elsa Schiaparelli made an enormous straw hat in 1949 with two holes cut through it so the wearer could slip inside it entirely at the beach — a hat as architecture, as installation, as a very good joke about what a hat is supposed to do. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, for his Spring/Summer 1991 collection, wove an entire jacket from straw, collapsing the distance between hat and garment so completely that you stop caring what to call it. And Jacquemus sent his Le Chapeau Bomba — a hat so overscale it reads more like a weather event than an accessory — down the Spring 2018 runway, where it became one of the most photographed fashion objects of the decade.

Susanne's hats have the same quality. They are graphic and sculptural and shot through with wit, and that wit is non-negotiable. This year she translated the classic paper hat — the one everyone folded from a sheet of newspaper as a child — into wheat straw, making something both monumental and instantly recognisable. "It brings me so much joy," she says. "What all of my hats have in common is a sense of humour and a wink. I want them to feel light and effortless, and for people to simply smile when they see one or wear one." She describes moving through the world with her eyes permanently open, thinking in shapes, always inside the logic of what the material will allow. "The material always guides the form."

The technique itself — wheat straw braiding, rooted in the cottage industries of northern Italy and Switzerland — is genuinely rare now, and Susanne is one of the few milliners who still masters it. She sources the braids from the same region in northern Italy where the tradition was born, then works them on a sewing machine that is nearly a hundred years old. "It makes a warm, almost purring sound," she says.

"Before working with the straw, I spray it with water to make it more pliable. It smells sooo good." A hat takes at least two days: the braids sewn into a basic shape, pressed over a wooden hat block, left to dry overnight, then the slower work the following day — pom-poms by hand, ribbons by hand, the small decisions that accumulate into something finished. She can't give a precise hour count because the process doesn't work that way, and neither does her day. She is in the studio by eight most mornings, when her mind is clearest. Production periods are long and tightly focused — hats being shipped around the world, a kind of disciplined momentum. But when something new is being developed, the schedule softens completely. She experiments, goes out for coffee, comes back, sometimes finds herself at the machine until midnight.

She has made hats for Lacroix, Mugler, and Gaultier — three designers who share almost nothing except a refusal to call something finished before it's right and a genuine hunger to remake the familiar into something unrecognisable. "What united all of the designers I worked with was their perfectionism and their desire to create something new, or to reinterpret something familiar in a new way. Being part of that process was an absolute privilege." Theater, which she entered through three productions with director Robert Wilson, asked something different of her entirely — hats that could survive not just a photograph but a body in motion on a stage, eight shows a week, night after night. "Actors and dancers have to work with their costumes; the hat must never restrict them. Instead, it helps them step into their role." Wilson's visual language, she says, was so singular she could never quite get enough of it, and you can feel that hunger in her own practice — the sense of someone who is always watching, always storing things up.

She teaches now at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin, handing the technique forward. The question she returns to most often in the studio — with her students and with herself — is a simple one: "Am I truly satisfied with this, or could it be better?" It is, in the end, the only question that matters.

The studio is what you might expect from someone who thinks this way: a productive chaos, the walls lined with antique hat blocks that carry the traces of every pair of hands that worked with them before hers. She has a large garden outside Berlin and keeps fresh flowers in the studio always.

When we ask which objects from PORTA she'd want living alongside her hats — in an entryway, on a shelf, among the things she chooses to keep close — she gravitates immediately to the vases, especially those by George Bronwin. "In a way, they are sculptures too, much like my hats."

We couldn't agree more. A wheat straw hat and a handmade ceramic vase are, at their core, the same kind of object: shaped by the demands of their material, humbled by the time they require, and stubbornly impossible to ignore. Things that began somewhere specific — a field, a kiln, a regional tradition, a woman at a hundred-year-old sewing machine in Kreuzberg — and arrived, through some combination of skill and joy and refusal to do things the easy way, as something worth keeping.