From luxury houses to army tricorns, this hat shop from Aude has managed to keep its head above water

In Montazels, the last hat factory in the Upper Aude valley, a center of hat production in France for more than a century, is putting up resistance. “We are the last millinery in France to produce our own felt. Here, the wool comes in as a bundle and comes out as a hat,” explains Sonia Mielke. This Franco-Irish dynamic, after spending all the summers of her childhood with her grandparents in Montazels, now divides her time between Paris and Aude as president of MontCapel, a cooperative created in 2019 to take over hat making.