A few decades ago, Annabel Lewis was having dinner with friends in London and, over a couple of bottles of wine, they tried to come up with a name for the ribbon, trimmings and accessories store she was planning to open. Eventually, the group consulted a French dictionary.
“Everything sounds quite good in French,” Ms. Lewis said recently, sitting in her small office at V V Rouleaux, the name they chose that night.
“We went through the dictionary. This is rolls of ribbon, so rouleaux means rolls,” she said, referring to the shop’s specialty item. “We just did V V before it because it sounded good.”
The shop, which totals about 900 square feet on two levels, has colorful spools of ribbon, including grosgrain and velvet; tiny tassels that could be used on key chains and giant ones that might become curtain tie-backs; wide headbands in tweed or bouclé, reminiscent of a Chanel suit; metallic flowers; and brooches made of wool.
There are corsages of perforated patent leather, too. They, like many things in the store, are made by hand, in this case at a factory in Italy. “The only way to make them is handmade,” Ms. Lewis said. “They’re cut out — it’s like making pastry.”
Ribbons come from ateliers in Italy, France, the Netherlands and other countries, while some of the distinctive fabrics are made by Linton Tweeds, a British company that also has worked with Bottega Veneta, Celine and Gucci.
Hats — the V V Chapeaux collection — were added to the stock about 25 years ago and now provide about a third of the business’s annual sales. Ms. Lewis said revenues exceeded a million pounds (about $1.3 million) in 2023, although she declined to be specific about the total.
The majority of the styles are what she called perchers: small hats that sit on top of the wearer’s head, secured with combs or an elastic strap, and are adorned with bits like marabou feathers in periwinkle or vintage marine-blue grosgrain bows.
About half of the hats are purchased as custom orders, with the buyer choosing details such as flowers, mesh or lace. This time of year, the color palette gets a bit darker with black and navy perchers and wool felt trilbies in navy and loden green.
The price for ready-made hats begins at £79 for items like a thick headband of pastel-flicked wool tweed, and go up to £499 for a teal blue fez-like wool hat with ribbons folded precisely into long, elegant spikes. (A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II wearing a V V Rouleaux hat adorned with silk and rayon flowers hangs above Ms. Lewis’s desk.)
Although V V Rouleaux sells on its website — online sales make up about 15 percent of its revenue — Ms. Lewis said she vastly preferred that customers visit in person. “I like people to come to the shop and discover it and enjoy it and get involved in it — to come in and muck around and try the hats on,” she said. “It’s a sort of entertainment.”
The store has provided ribbons to fashion brands such as Burberry and Loewe, and for costumes in the “Bridgerton” series as well as the Harry Potter films. There also were V V Rouleaux feathers in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” and its rosettes and sashes were used in the recent Ridley Scott film “Napoleon.”
Ms. Lewis lives in Cumbria, an area in northwest England not far from the Scottish border, and creates several hundred hats a year in her home workshop. She orders prefabricated bases, including wool pillbox shapes and satin fascinators, and then customizes each one with accents such as ribbons made from recycled plastic, vintage French jet beads, straw butterflies and rattan braid. “I get the hat and the hat tells me what it wants to be,” she said.
Albert Sala, the chief executive of QbdFashion Barcelona, said Ms. Lewis “really has a very, very clear idea of what she wants.” (She recently bought a large supply of emu feathers from Mr. Sala’s company.)
“It’s very emotional what she does,” he noted. “It looks like she’s doing it from the bottom of her heart.”
During the store’s busiest months — usually spring and the holiday season — several of V V Rouleaux’s 15 full-time employees frequently stitch custom orders on the store’s lower level.
Such millinery work is time-consuming. “It’s very hard to make a profit, because there’s a lot of hand-labor hours,” said Janet Linville, an adjunct assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “There’s not a lot of things that can be done by machine.”
Ms. Lewis — who declined to share her age except to say, “I’m over 60 but I think I’m 45” — grew up on a farm close to where she now lives with her husband, Richard, who also works in the business.
She was very young when she began creating things: At 7 years old, she recalled, she took the aluminum foil needed to cook Christmas dinner so she could make shiny accessories for a seasonal wreath. Her parents were farmers, although her mother worked at one point for Madge Chard, a well-known midcentury milliner in London.
At 16, Ms. Lewis moved to London and within a few years had opened her own flower shop. When she was ready for a change, she said, ribbons seemed a logical focus, in part because she already had searched out unusual ones to tie floral bouquets.
And ribbons, she said, have a key advantage over flowers: “Ribbons don’t die.”
