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Milliner Felicity Northeast offers an augmented reality filter try on a hat virtually

Milliner Felicity Northeast offers an augmented reality filter try on a hat virtually

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A day at the races, says milliner Felicity Northeast, is incomplete without a hat. She is biased, of course, being in the hat game, but such conventions do indeed exist – at the spring racing carnival, even in 2022, women are expected to don headwear.

And while there might be something a little anachronistic about the custom, the industry is becoming more modern. This year, you can try on your hat virtually, using an augmented reality filter.

Felicity Northeast says the AR filter can offer “does give you an idea of what might work for you, and give you more confidence”. 

“During COVID [lockdowns], I had expressed to a few people that it would be so helpful to try on hats at home,” says Northeast, a dietitian turned milliner. “Wouldn’t it be great if people could see, from their phone, if something suited them?”

Then she found Creative Victoria, a community body that included her in a pilot program for AR filters.

“At the time I didn’t even really know what a filter was,” she says. The program was challenging to articulate. “Millinery is a lot harder than, say, sunglasses,” says Northeast, “because it is working out where it should put things on your face, and putting things on your head is a bit harder.”

Felicity Northeast bucket hat, $320. 

She and the team at Ignition Immersive, funded by Creative Victoria, used a variety of face shapes, ethnicities and ages to develop a filter that she is confident will work for a broad range of clients, and the filter is now live on Northeast’s Instagram.

“It probably won’t replace trying on hats in person,” says Northeast, “but it does give you an idea of what might work for you, and give you more confidence.”

Northeast is confident the filter will work for a broad range of clients. 

A standard rule of thumb for styling hats, says Northeast, is to pull them forward (“most people wear them too far back”) and tilt them slightly back. “This gives a very complimentary angle,” she says.

Virtual try-on is nothing new – Bailey Nelson offers the technology to test glasses, and Gucci has been allowing customers to “try on” shoes since 2019. But the tech received a COVID-19 bump as shoppers were forced out of physical stores, and hats are the latest accessories to receive the try-on treatment.

As for spring racing trends, Northeast is predicting a return to headbands and straw boaters, and says that while women are still matching dresses to hats, these days the rules are more flexible.

“These are more relaxed styles that you can wear again, to other events,” she says. “I love the idea of wearing hats to more than one occasion. Wear them to a barbecue, a garden party. Hats should not just be for the races.”

This content was originally published here.