The North East Film Archive is one of a network of regional film archives established to collect, preserve and show film made in, or about the North East of England. Our collections are non-fiction, and date from the early 1900s to the present day, providing a rich record of life in the region over the 20th century. Many of our films are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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.
From the collection of:
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.
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