Natalia Baquero Millinery

Natalia Baquero was born in Bogotá, in a house where color was never decorative; it was language, taught the way other children learn to read. Her grandmother moved between painting, jewelry, and textile work without ever treating them as separate disciplines and turned even an ordinary dinner table into something staged, considered, almost exhibited. Her mother carries that same instinct still, present in Natalia’s work itself, not only in how it began.

At sixteen, she entered the world of fashion, where she first understood a garment as something capable of meaning more than it showed. Colombia’s emerging conceptual fashion scene, blurring the line between fashion, craftsmanship, and contemporary art, gave that instinct a language. Studies in Audiovisual Media and Film followed, and it was there, in costume design, that identity, character, and material finally converged into a single discipline.

Natalia moved to Canada in 2005. Two years later, she joined Cirque du Soleil’s millinery department, brought in for her hand-sewing expertise, long before she had any formal training in millinery itself. It was there that the hat revealed what it could hold: not an accessory, but a complete artistic language, carrying identity, narrative, and emotion at once. Millinery has been her medium since.

Her practice is based today in Knowlton, Québec, where her atelier-gallery serves both as a space for bespoke commissions and as a destination for contemporary millinery as its own artistic discipline. Since 2008, an ongoing collaboration with a community of women weavers in Sandoná, Nariño, has brought hand-woven Iraca straw, and the matrilineal tradition behind it, into the center of her work.

In 2024, Natalia’s work entered the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In May 2026, she was formally included in the Homo Faber Guide by the Michelangelo Foundation and invited to present live demonstrations at the Homo Faber Biennale in Venice in September 2026.

From the circus ring to the ballet stage, from museum vitrines to editorial pages, her work has moved through nearly every register a hat can occupy, spectacle and stillness, performance and permanence. What began as a question about identity continues to expand into new forms, new collaborations, new rooms the world has not yet imagined for millinery to enter.