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Karyn Ruiz of Lilliput Hats poses for a photo at her shop in Toronto on Oct. 23, 2018.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail

Karyn Ruiz might be best known for creating the hats musician Gord Downie wore during his Tragically Hip farewell tour, but she really owes her career to horses.

“It’s big, really big,” the designer of Lilliput Hats says when asked how much business she gets from the pomp that surrounds the horse-racing world. This past year alone, Ruiz did up 40 hats for England’s Royal Ascot and the Kentucky Derby, and many more for two of Toronto’s marquee racing events, the Thrill of Ascot fundraiser for Best Buddies and the Queen’s Plate.

Among them was a cloud of tulle and organza dotted with 15 handmade cabbage roses for fashion enthusiast Suzanne Rogers. It was inspired by a giant pink “meringue” Ruiz made for Rogers a few years back to wear to Royal Ascot.

“We were in the royal enclosure, so I wanted something special,” Rogers explains. “Karyn made this massive My Fair Lady hat that was tulle and netting and weightless, a true couture hat. I was stopped everywhere I went, with people wanting to take pictures. It was a showstopper.”

Ruiz, formerly known as Gingras (she changed her name after Mr. Right walked through the door of her shop seven years ago), is marking three decades in business this year. She made the switch to millinery from a career in social work after leaving her job in London, Ont., and moving to Toronto.

“I was working in post-psychiatric care for years and was going to go back to school for my masters,” she says, sitting at a massive cutting table in her charming boutique on the edge of Toronto’s Little Italy. “I thought I would take a night school class just to keep my brain occupied with something creative. It was the eighties and I had just seen the movie White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. I decided to do tap dancing, but the class was full, so I switched to millinery. I was kind of into hats.”

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A display at Lilliput Hats in Toronto.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail

Ruiz quickly realized that her love of old films and vintage clothing gave her an eye for hat design. But she says it took a long time to sink in that millinery was going to be her next career.

She started selling at craft shows and a handmade market in Yorkville, where a hat buyer from Holt Renfrew spotted her work. That sparked a 25-year wholesale relationship that ended two years ago, although she still gets plenty of special orders through Holt’s personal shoppers.

Early support also came from the Orthodox Jewish community. At the time, Ruiz had not yet amassed her collection of 800 or so wooden hat blocks, so she would mould felt and straw over a salad bowl or citrus juicer – anything that would create the desired effect. “It’s a very basic skill – steam, a hammer, and your hands,” Ruiz says of how hats are crafted. “That process has not changed for hundreds of years.”

What has changed is that she now fields daily orders from around the world through lilliputhats.com, which features styles ranging from feathery fascinators to something that resembles a tangle of yellow shoelaces. Half of Ruiz’s business is custom orders – anything from the wild explosion of black tulle Jennifer Lopez wore in a Vogue Russia shoot to a pumpkin-inspired piece in orange silk velvet for a bride whose fiance nicknamed her “Pumpkin.”

The Downie project came to her through designer Izzy Camilleri, who created the ailing singer’s wardrobe for his goodbye tour. “Gord sent me a photo of Bob Dylan from the seventies,” Ruiz explains. “That’s the look he wanted to channel.” But Downie was eight inches taller than Dylan, so Ruiz created a block for him (one she still uses) and worked until she got the proportions just right. “The great thing about millinery is that if you don’t like the way it turns out, you can steam the shape out of it and redo it. It’s very forgiving in a lot of ways, which is great, because the raw materials are quite expensive.”

She did six hats in total for Downie: playful ones with porcupine quills and metallic-dyed leaves and branches, and two more sombre styles for his Secret Path performances with rustic elements such as bone and eagle feathers. As a personal touch, Ruiz silk-screened some of her favourite Hip lyrics and used them as linings.

Other commissions include the beret that Sally Hawkins’s character wears in The Shape of Water and the perfect little pillbox Sophie Grégoire Trudeau donned for her audience with the Pope. Music fans are another client base, she says, with many requests for styles worn by Lenny Kravitz and Leon Russell. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to do a hat that Jimi Hendrix wore.”

After three decades, it’s the back and forth with clients for custom orders that gives Ruiz the most pleasure. “Buying a hat isn’t like buying a purse or a pair of shoes. It hits a nostalgia button for a lot of people. Often the hat is an homage to a grandfather or another relative, and I get to hear those stories. What we do here has invigorated the art of conversation. And the hat is the end product.”

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