“Fair is foul and foul is fair”

Majesty, a collaboration by Mary Perrott, Wendy Petersen and Margaret Doyle, was the winner of the 1999 Taranaki Creative Headwear Awards in Stratford.

What similarities does a farming town in Taranaki have with the great poet Shakespeare? Probably not very many. Yet a drive around the streets of Stratford introduces you to many Shakespearean characters. The glockenspiel clock tower in the centre of town even re-enacts Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene four times a day.

Perrott, Petersen and Doyle created this headpiece Majesty in response to the juxtaposition of the ugly and the beautiful in Shakespeare’s words. They aimed to uncover the uncomfortable and to display its bare bones dressed in beautiful Elizabethan finery.