Harvy Santos’s Sunami Sculptural Headpiece in Stitched Braid. Photo courtesy of Harvy Santos
The Cavite-born former ballet dancer Harvy Santos is now shaping a name for himself in Hollywood and London as a millinery maverick.
We’ve finally reached an interlude in the storm of Wicked. Last year, we saw the globe turn a shade of Emerald City green with a viral press tour, method dressing, and an “insufferable” amount of Cynthia and Ariana memes.
It officially became the highest-grossing film based on a Broadway musical after Mamma Mia! with currently $681.3M at the worldwide box office. This month, we’ve seen the digital release of the film with 10 extended and deleted scenes and witnessed Glinda thank ‘Botox and Juvederm’ for her Rising Star award at the Palm Spring International Film Festival.
As we expect to see more acting nominations come into fulfillment, too often enough, we overlook the artistry behind the scenes in producing a blockbuster. In cinematography, the cue of “lights, camera, action” encapsulates the three key stages of the filming process but doesn’t quite include the crucial visual element of costume design.
Paul Tazewell may have had the ‘starring role’ designing over 1,000 outfits and orchestrating an entire cast of costume designers to bring the Land of Oz to life, but one anthropological element of this make-believe society is headwear. No world of wizards is complete without hats, and Cavite-born Harvy Santos was one of six milliners hatting the popular population, as a senior milliner who lost count exclusively crafting hats for the ensemble.

He’s a Filipino milliner whose contemporary designs have won the admiration and approval of Queen Elizabeth II and Lady Gaga alike, donning a pink cowboy creation for her Joanne royal portrait. Like many creatives, Harvy Santos’s passion for the arts was cultivated from a young age. “I was six years old when my late sister Len Ag Santos-Siasoco introduced me to the theatre world,” he says. “She was a stage actress who would bring me to her rehearsals [and] I would hang out in the costume room at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.”
“I still vividly remember the feel of the textures on my fingers and the subtle glimmer of metallic threads woven into the brocade,” he recalls of the rows of costumes in the wardrobe department. 12 years later, with his dream of becoming a ballet dancer, Harvy returned to the brutalist building to audition for a scholarship at the Ballet Philippines Dance School. “I knew from the start of my dancing career that it was going to be a short one,” he confesses, but his self-deprecating nature didn’t stop him from winning the scholarship at Ballet Philippines and then another for Hong Kong in 1997.

When Harvy wasn’t en pointe, he’d help in the costume and production departments, fuelling his fascination. Through these years at the Hong Kong Ballet, a friendship blossomed with the head of the costume department, who encouraged his inkling and even helped him source his first sewing machine. “I bought books and read them during breaks from dance rehearsal and studied garment construction on my own in my spare time…there were not a lot of applied arts courses that I could do part-time or in the evenings, so my options were limited.”
Santos’s first designs were worn by his friends. “I would make them ridiculous outfits and hats and make sure they had a grand entrance!” and after hanging up his ballet shoes for the last time in 2005, he began working full-time jobbing around in hair, make-up, and costume design for short-run opera productions.


Renowned as an epicenter of millinery, Harvy relocated to London after his husband was offered a job there in 2008. “I had a vision of working for West End productions, but that vision was challenged by my limited work experience and lack of formal education in the field.”
This didn’t deter his ambitions, and he found salvation in a specialist publication called The Hat Magazine while gearing up to be a “zombified 18th-century wench” in a local haberdashery. “This magazine became my fairy godmother—it’s dedicated to everything in the hat industry.” He then enrolled himself in a one-week workshop with Rose Cory, former milliner to the Queen’s Mother. Afterwards, he went back to school at Kensington and Chelsea College (now Morley College) and studied the craft of millinery for a full year, entering hat competitions and interning experience for Noel Stewart.
Upon graduation, he found himself working part-time at the prestigious Royal Ballet and Opera. A production project with Stephen Jones “creating veiled beanies for a Jil Sander collaboration” came up, and led to his recruitment as an assistant in 2012. “I have so many fond memories during my time there, but the ones I hold most dearly involve seeing him work his magic on the spot.” It was an immense privilege to Harvy to be working with Jones, one of the most prolific milliners in high fashion, whose methodology isn’t too dissimilar to Madame Grès: “he manipulates a lot of different materials…suddenly there’s poetry coming from the folds and drapery, language in a misplaced flower petal, it’s such a buzz!”
In 2013, Harvy Santos finally won first place in The Hat Magazine’s Hat Designer of the Year competition, with a grand prize of a stand at Premiere Classe, the biggest trade show for hats and accessories at Paris Fashion Week, and gave him the incentive to launch his own label. “In my collections, there’s always a quivering moment, just like when a ballerina does her bourée,” he declares about his work.

After multiple seasons of “very colorful and decorated” designs. Santos’s most recent projects reclaimed his core identity in form and image. “I took my signature shapes and stripped off their frivolous decoration, limiting myself to strips of raffia, braids, and wood” for his “Stripped” collection. “I make every piece myself at home…I put the focus on the core materials and structural workmanship.”
His last collection was inspired by the movement of water; “stillness, swirls and chaos” were the three words stuck in his mind, from déjà vu of the news of heavy rain and flooding across the UK, reminiscing his youth back in Cavite. Made an edit with “useless” doodles from weather-bound reflections, he took the moniker of “H2O” from his husband. He said, “You know your name starts with an H, and this is your 20th collection, and your inspiration is water. Do you know what else spells water?”
While we wait for award season to give the final verdict on the success of Wicked in the eyes of industry professionals, Vogue Philippines asks Harvy Santos about his experience working on the film in a Q&A below.
Can you tell us about how you came into your role as the senior milliner for Wicked?
During the pandemic, work was hard to find. I was introduced to Sophie Lambe, who later became head of the millinery department for Wicked, and she was working on Bridgerton at the time. She needed some help, and we got along well, and she called me for other work after that. When Wicked came to fruition, she needed to form and lead a team of milliners to execute the designs by Paul Tazewell. She said it was a huge film and would need lots of hands.

The scope of work was to develop and make all the headwear in the movie. Everything you see in the film is original. She was in charge of the main characters and the rest of us would be making hats for the hundreds of actors, dancers, and stunt performers. Once given the approved design drawings, we would start exploring shapes in cardboard or scrap material before creating them in the actual fabrics. We would also work with other teams of creatives on the crew, including leather workers, 3D modelers, textile artists, and embroidery teams. With Paul’s intricate and highly detailed designs, the elements for a particular hat sometimes needed to be produced by different departments and we put them all together, making sure they fit well. They were tailored to each performer and lightweight, sometimes with extra nets so the hair artists could pin it to a head or with a special structure so it could float on a wig.
What was it like bringing Paul’s vision to life? What was your collaboration like?
A very enjoyable challenge! Every brief could be daunting and overwhelming, especially in the early days of production. We were given lots of references to dive in and out of, categorized by the Oz-ian villages and worlds—Winkie, Munchkinland or Emerald City. It helped us to understand where everything was coming from, how it was all related, and why it mattered. Suddenly, the aesthetic was born with a modern twist, and we began to see this new vision of Oz in the creators’ eyes. Paul would drop by the workshop, and we would line up the hats for a particular scene for him to see, semi-finished and sometimes pinned up, and there would be interaction with them. He would sometimes ask how it would be finished or ask to have a piping here and there and tell us if something worked or not. Paul is very tactile, and I noticed how he moved his hands on the hats. Those gestures gave me clues about whether he liked a certain trim, surface, or texture or how he would direct the dynamic of a particular shape or line of the sculpture. This was my first time working with Paul, and it was very important for me to understand his design language.

What was a typical day like in the workroom?
A typical day ranged from busy to really, really busy. It’s a 10-hour day and a 5-day week. It can be exhausting, but there’s always excitement—whether receiving the new materials from the pleaters, packing and sending finished hats to set, or getting new designs to execute. Sophie kept the tasks really varied and kept us on our toes. She might ask me to make the caps for the boatmen in Shiz, or an origami-inspired hat for an Emerald Citizen, or an Oz-ified version of a military cap for the guards. There were just six of us on the team and we all had varied backgrounds, with different expertise and techniques we could share and learn from each other.
Of course, there were challenges, and they were abundant! There’s always that one hat that gets crushed and has to be repaired at the last minute, delivery delays of crucial materials, slight changes to the design that are very complicated, figuring out origami patterns, and on and on. The creative process is constant problem-solving and it’s similar to working in the fashion and theatre industries. The greatest thing about working in a team is that everyone pitches in to help, and we are all made aware of situations. We would plot our ‘plan B solutions’ during teatime in anticipation of worst-case scenarios. We were the dream team!

Do you have a favorite moment out of all your experiences working within the costume department of Wicked? Can you take us to your proudest moment in the workroom?
I have lots! One big thing I enjoyed a lot was having other specialist creative departments within the studio complex to help with specific elements on our hats. Sometimes the materials were not quite the right tone for the rest of the trims that were already chosen for a particular character hat, so I could send that to the textile department for them to color match it. We had the embroidery department, who could embroider a ribbon to use as a trim for a hat, and the costume props department would come in handy if we needed an ornate leather strap for the helmet. Everyone was so close it was almost like a small village. It just made perfect sense when we were working on a super-fast schedule.
My proudest moment of all was not in the workroom. One of the perks of the job was going to the tents where the actors get made up and dressed to make sure that the hats were on people’s heads correctly or so we could do last-minute repairs. There was that buzz of energy from everyone. We also got to see how everyone was put together, with nice little surprises like when you saw that the shoes also matched the hat. Then we hopped on a minibus to the set and saw the costumes in context as part of the whole vision, and that was exhilarating. And sometimes, we got a sneak peek on the monitors and felt totally transported to Oz. That’s when I felt proud. And experienced that feeling (and more!) when I saw the finished film.