Top hatter: The unstoppable Crystal Birch
“Ever since I first came here in 2004 during a school outing, I knew I wanted to work here,” Crystal Birch told Maverick Life editor Emilie Gambade and me back in February 2019, when we visited her at Parisian Milliners in Cape Town just a few months after she had joined the factory’s then 84-year-old owner, Harry Faktor, as a business partner. In the 14 years between that moment in 2004 and April 2018 when she joined the business, she’d studied millinery, built a career as a stylist, unsuccessfully tried to intern at Parisian Milliners, and then went on to launch her eponymous hat b...