Aage Thaarup

Aage Thaarup
Born	Aage Gjerfing Thaarup 1906 Copenhagen
Died	11 December 1987 Chelsea, London
Occupation	Milliner
Notable credit(s)	Royal Warrant to the Queen, 1961

Aage Thaarup (1906–1987) was a Danish-born milliner who ran a celebrated hatmaking business in London between the 1930s and 1970s.

Among his notable clients were the Queen Mother and Queen – for whom he designed the bearskin tricorn worn at the annual Trooping the Colour parade. When this famous hat was displayed at an exhibition in 2003, Suzy Menkes said in The New York Times: "There is a particular combination of madness and dignity to the dashing tricorn that Aage Thaarup created".

There was certainly an eccentric element to many of Thaarup's hats – he once created a design modelled on the Royal Albert Hall for a British Pathé news feature – but this was underpinned by hat design skills garnered from a long apprenticeship in Copenhagen, Delhi, Paris and Berlin. During a more than 40-year career, he was beset by financial difficulties on more than one occasion and still retained a loyal customer base – not least The Queen. His Times obituary noted: "He was not hardened by fame or fortune. He wore a cheerful disposition and a bow-tie always at a ten-to-four angle".

Aage Gjerfing Thaarup was born in Copenhagen, the second of four sons in a family of modest means. He wanted to be a schoolteacher, but his parents could not afford to pay his college fees so he got a job in the hat department of Fornesbeck, then Copenhagen's largest department store. Although this was intended to be a stopgap, he remained there for three years and decided he liked working with hats. After getting an education grant, which he supplemented with English teaching and fashion drawing, Thaarup worked for a spell in both Berlin and Paris – in Paris he got a job at the renowned hatmaking salon Maison Lewis. He had no hatmakers in his family, but would later say that his grandmother had made shoes for Queen Alexandra

Moving to London – on a one-way ticket using borrowed money – he sold hats for a time as a commercial traveller, but found he could not make enough to live on. An army officer who had recently returned from India suggested he try his luck there. He borrowed more money and travelled first class to Bombay, selling hundreds of hats during the voyage and building up a client base. Travelling on to other Indian cities, he continued making hats, getting help with construction and materials (many of which were improvised) from the men who sewed for a living in India's bazaars.

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