Making hats was not something Gema had ever imagined doing: she had never studied fashion, nor had she ever been interested in sewing. The first time she made a hat was as a favour, helping to style a catalogue. She had just finished studying interior design, so she designed a kind of small space that was inside out, that is to say, instead of furniture being inside the four walls, outside of the walls she put a kind of dome that would be supported on the head of the wearer.
She stitched each hem and each seam with no real idea of what she was doing, she says. But she did it “with awe and enchantment, like someone writing by hand for the first time in a foreign alphabet; breathing deeply, being very patient and trying to understand the basics: where the holes went, where the thread went. I knew straight away that I was hooked by doing this”.

Gema Galdón does not call herself a milliner, nor an artist, nor a craftswoman, she simply makes… and she is satisfied with this word: making; she makes pieces that are placed on the head or on the body, which act as a base for them.

After the frenzied excitement of opening a space near Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia to exhibit and sell her creations, she decided to train in traditional hat making, following the rule-book closely for the first few years until little by little, she began to reformulate her processes.

Over the years, she dusted off her tools from her Fine Arts background and brought in knowledge from other disciplines, such as photography and architecture. Her projects emerged one by one from her workshop table, until she consolidated her characteristic non-milliner style. In some pieces she included a pinch of her performance side.

The way that Gema Galdón constructs her pieces is mainly her own combination of techniques: she puts together all sorts of discarded materials that she finds in other designers’ workshops. She selects, cleans, and classifies them, from large swathes to little boxes containing tiny scraps of fabric, loose threads, beads… The other element she uses is air, which she traps between layers and then shows off by catching the light.

She believes that if she had not taken this step, she would never have worked on such interesting film and theatre projects or have her work shown at the MET.