Barnaby Horn
A milliner who turned the headpieces he made for drag into a new language for storytelling.
Form salons where you share what you've learned without expecting anything in return. Make learning from each other a community habit.
How Barnaby Horn left their lane.
Barnaby Horn moved from literature and drag into millinery – and now wants to create more space for artists working at its edges.
Barnaby Horn came to millinery through drag.
After studying English Literature, he moved to Manchester and performed as Minty, drawn to a form in which one person could be writer, director, costume designer and performer at once. Increasingly, it was the things he was making for his head – hats, masks, horns – that held his attention.
The route into fashion was not straightforward.
After losing his day job during the pandemic, Horn crowdfunded his way onto a course at Central Saint Martins before going on to study at the Royal College of Art. There, millinery gave him a way to carry the storytelling of drag into objects that could speak even when he was no longer in the room.
His graduate project, How to Read Clouds, brought hats together with digital projection, performance and sculpture to explore queer identity and the meanings people construct around objects. Since graduating in 2023, his work has appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Drag SOS and the Oscars red carpet. He joined Cockpit through its Feltmakers’ Award and has since been recognised by The King’s Foundation.
Now he is turning his attention from his own practice to the community around it.
In 2026, Horn co-founded Artist Milliners with Naomi Larh – creating a space for practitioners working between traditional millinery and fine art to share knowledge, exhibit together and push at the boundaries of what the craft can hold.
Horn found millinery through a form that already blurred performance, fashion, identity and art.
He is now building a community around the idea that the most interesting craft happens when those boundaries stay open.
