Born: Urana, Australia, 1931
Frederick Fox, England's most distinguished milliner, is an Australian who spent his childhood on a farm in New South Wales. During the Second World War, he created new hats by cutting up old ones and reconstructing them. At 17 years old he moved to Sydney, where he visited other milliners - first Henriette Lamotte, who pointed him in the direction of a Mrs Normoyle. Nine months later he moved to Phyl Clarkson, where he stayed for ten years. He travelled to London via Paris and secured a job with Otto Lucas. It was, by his own admission, a tough learning curve: `I was 26, looked 15 and was in charge of a table of 40 women old enough to be my mother.' He moved on to Mitzi Lorenz, then to Langée in Brook Street, London, which he took over in 1964, and then moved to his present premises in Bond Street.
Mariano Fortuny was a visionary, Renaissance man and creator of revolutionary fabrics. His Delphos gown, devised in 1907 and patented two years later, was a masterpiece of fabric and form: a free-flowing revelation in a period of restriction, made from a tube of pleated silk. In one stroke of genius, Fortuny embodied the principles of the aesthetic and rational dress movements, whose supporters relentlessly campaigned for the abolition of torturous corsetry. His dresses were drawn on Greek lines, suspended from the shoulder and later decorated with Venetian glass beads. `This invention is related to a type of garment derived from the Classical robe,' stated Fortuny's original patent description, `but its design is so shaped and arranged that it can be worn and adjusted with ease and comfort.'