MEET THE MAKER
INSIDE MUHLBAUER'S second-floor atelier, off a sleepy street in central Vienna, 15 or so milliners are making hats the way they did when the brand started out in 1903. The staff are mostly young and mainly female, and they use clacking old sewing machines to construct banana-grass straw hats, and hammer at tactile felt stretched over thick wooden moulds. The creations are still steamed in the rusty, flame-lit steam bell that did the job over a hundred years ago.