Kempton Park hatter Phillip Botha's bold pieces are breath-taking and he breathes creativity in many ways. He believes love conquers all, too.
There is just no way in hell that Phillip Botha could ever be ordinary. Life is a wonderland for this hatter from Kempton Park, whose philosophy is based on a single rule of thumb that he lives by. Being alive is about joy, love and a big smile. It’s authentic, idealistic and a notion as eccentric as he is. But it’s in the best way possible.
“The essence of life is the love for a soul,” Botha said. “If I can truly love your soul and see what you need, I can fulfil that need through anything creative that brings beauty into your life.”
For him, that beauty often comes in the form of hats. Glorious and theatrical hats. Botha has been making them since 1992.
It started in church, “because at my church, ladies still wear hats on Sundays”.
“I started off by making them for my mom and sister. From there, it just grew,” he said.
Botha has clients across the country, and his hats are still worn in churches and at high-profile social events.
Gloriously theatrical hats
But milliner is not Botha’s only job title. He’s also an accomplished make-up artist and has worked in theatre and television, through to brides, he makes handbags, he’s a choir master and has a B. Com in personnel management.
“I have also been a butcher, I have built houses,” he shared. “My skills range from the total butch through to the feminine, I do it all.” These days, he also washes cars when he’s on duty at his partner’s mobile car wash service.
But, back to the hats. He learned the craft the old-school way, shaping cactus fibre into floppy forms that were steamed and coaxed into something wearable. When fashion fundamentals changed in the early 2000s, he moved on to banana-leaf fibre, which allowed him to sculpt even more dramatic headwear.
Everything Botha makes is constructed from scratch. He does not use moulded shells or mass-produced shortcuts. Instead, he scavenges and upcycles. He picks up seed pods, bits of wood, discarded trims, strange little shapes most people walk past, and turns them into drama.
Use whatever and make it beautiful
A friend once gave him a train off her wedding dress made of peacock feathers. She could not take with her when moving overseas. They are now slowly becoming headpieces. “I like to use the weird and wonderful,” he said. “You need to use whatever there is and make it beautiful.”
He said that hats round off an outfit but no matter how dramatic or elaborate, headpieces must never overshadow a woman’s beauty. Sometimes though, he said, clients request seriously bold hats and give him absolute creative freedom.
“They’re semi-orgasmic when the courier arrives with the hat,” he said. “These are not polite hats. They are big and they are bold. They have opinions.”
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Botha said that if he had to choose a public personality in South Africa to match a hat to, and create one to match them, it would be for Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille.
”It would be bright, bold and impossible to ignore. Cerise, pink. Lime green. Purple. Those are the colours,” he said. “She has always been so passionate and vocal, and the hat should reflect that along with her fighting spirit.”
He adds a disclaimer: he is non-political and just because De Lille deserves a bold hat, it does not necessarily mean he agrees with her politics.
‘The only thing that fills it is love’
His many creative avenues are what he calls the drops that fill his bucket. But the reason for all of them is the same. It’s about expression and joy, looping back to his life philosophy. He said that he has little time for status, shopping and chasing validation. He walked away from working on television productions because of what he called the hunger for celebrity.
“We are trying to fill a black hole with things,” he said. “And the more you shop, the bigger the hole becomes. The only thing that can fill it is love.”
Botha turns to his sewing machine not just to create stuff, but he finds solace beside it. He said that he cannot sit through a movie.
“Three minutes in and I am asleep. So, the sewing machine lives next to the couch and that’s how I keep my mind active.”
His hands are always busy, he added and shared that his husband has learned not to worry when he starts arguing out loud with thread, chinwagging with scissors or cussing at eyes of needles when trying to push threads through.
Botha admits that he is somewhat eccentric but, he added, that it is a form of protest and rebellion at the same time.
“I do not do anything to draw attention to myself, but what I want to show the world is that you can live decently without following the prescribed template of husband, wife, 2.4 kids, dog, cat and fish. I just can’t,” he said.
