Unlikely style icon: Fleur Delacour

We all know that I’m a massive Harry Potter fan. I love everything about it. The themeing, the storylines, the cinematography, the characters, the actors, the fantasy, the costumes, the morals… I love it all. It’s not often I look to Harry Potter for fashion inspiration though. (Emma Watson at the premiers aside, of course. She's an actress, not a character!)

Costumes – yes. Fashion? No.

Until I went to Harry Potter Studios, that is. (Check out my review here)

Obviously I loved the whole thing, the sets, the props, the tours, the background talks, the Butterbeer but to walk away with some real-life accessory motivation was rather surprising. Anyone who’s read the books or watched Clemence Poesy in the films will agree that, when it comes down to it Fleur Delacour is the only character who gets anything even remotely stylish to wear but I’ve never really thought about it in any detail. One of the charms of the stories, for me, is the fact that the costumes are so “authentic”. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but you know what I mean – they’re not the clothes modern society wear, but not the clothes characters in your usual “fantasy” stories wear, they just seem to fit with the whole Harry Potter vision.

Seeing Fleur’s Beauxbatons uniform in the flesh was very exciting. That shade of blue is one of my favourite colours (also beloved of Marie Antoinette I think), I love a dress coat, I envy anyone that can wear a shoe-boot/high-vamp brogue (I have cankles), I want a reason to wear powder blue, leather driving gloves one day but most of all I am passionately in love with that amazing hat. On screen I loved it. In the flesh I had to resist the overwhelming urge to jump in, grab it and put it on my head. J'adore.

I’ve always loved a hat. I have literally hundreds of them. I was christened Viki the Hat by one of my friend’s dads at primary school because I was never without some kind of headgear. I can’t walk past a hat shop without stopping to look at the window display, and often spending far too long trying them all on. I used to stare jealously at the girls from the private school in my village that had to wear straw boaters to school every day. I wanted to don a hat on my wedding day (and was vetoed – resulting in two veils instead). I choose fancy dress costumes on the basis of incorporating a hat wherever possible. At my wedding my dad provided “traditional” head wear to guests according to their tables (named after cities Mr G and I had visited) as part of his speech, and I kept one of each in my memory box. I have never attended a wedding without wearing some kind of fancy head décor – even travelling all the way to Australia with a fascinator on my lap.

So it goes without saying that Fleur’s uniform hat rather high up my list of Highly Covetable Head Wear along with, amongst many, many others, a number of Royal wedding hats, Satine’s top hat in Moulin Rouge, Andie MacDowell’s hat in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Eliza's hat (and whole outfit) in My Fair Lady and Lara’s fur hat in Dr Zhivago.

I’ve found a seller on Etsy that makes one similar.

Is it really sad to buy one?