This film is part of Free

October 1968: Yeti Look

The streets of Newcastle turn catwalk for a radical haute couture homage to the mythical Himalayan Bigfoot.

Magazine and Review show 1968 2 mins

From the collection of:

Logo for North East Film Archive

Overview

A woman takes a walk on the wild side for this whimsical Tyne Tees TV magazine feature in the swinging Sixties. Wearing one of the wackier designs by fashionable, Paris-born milliner Simone Mirman, the young model’s shockingly surreal Yeti hat turns heads and provokes the laddish locals and gleefully sardonic reporter on her brazen walk through Newcastle city centre to a blind date.

Simone Mirman learned her trade with Rose Valois, a leading Parisian milliner of the 20s and 30s, and with the bold Italian fashion designer Schiaparelli. Her hats were ‘objects d’art’, inspired by everything from welders’ masks to langoustine. By the 1950s she was creating hats for actors, aristocrats and the royal family. The ‘way out’ Yeti look was made to shock and attract publicity. Priced at an exorbitant 50 guineas, it may have been the work of her husband, Serge, a communist Jewish medical student with whom she eloped to London before World War II to escape the disapproval of her middle-class Catholic parents.