Millinery Foundation: horsehair cloth

 

Sefar pillbox teaching sample for millinery class

Horsehair cloth is not new to the costume industry, but I have seen it showing up for sale at millinery suppliers & heard from theatrical milliners using it as a foundation material for hat construction, so I have made a sample pillbox with it to share with my fall class.

This material is sometimes referred to as filtration mesh or Sefar (a brand name) and it is often stocked in professional costume studios to be used for purposes such as crinolines and other floofy-skirt understructures. 

It is sold wholesale to industry as filter material for swimming pools and other liquid filtration applications, often in pre-cut sizes and shapes. Finding a vendor that will sell yardage has been a challenge, in that they are used to dealing in much larger quantities (10,000s of meters) than we are typically seeking for a costume application, although not so much now that I’ve see it showing up by the yard from hatmaking supply vendors.

A donor gave a dyed green bolt of it to our graduate program, hence, the color of the pillbox foundation in the above photograph. (The material is 100% nylon so it can be dyed with acid dyes.) 

Other pillbox teaching samples—at left sinamay, right stiff Leno, top buckram

My general impression of it as a millinery material is that it is flimsier and scratchier than buckram, more crushable but springs back easily, and difficult to procure in large enough quantities to make hats.  

So if, like I do, you work at a place that already stocks it in quantity, it’s another great resource. It’s worth knowing about, but unless you have a specific application for which it fulfills the needs of the project, it may not be worth the cost and trouble of obtaining some.

ETA: Milliner Mela Hoyt-Heydon reports that Mood Fabrics carries it under the name “Italian nylon canvas” in several colors.