Haven: Mühlbauer and the Art of Wearing Shelter.

Mühlbauer has always understood headwear as more than ornament. In its world, a hat is a point of negotiation - between climate and body, exposure and protection, inner life and outer conditions. With Haven, the Autumn Winter 2026/27 collection, this understanding crystallises into something quietly radical. Not a seasonal narrative, but a meditation on what it means to feel held when orientation falters.

The collection opens in elemental terms: rough seas, thick fog, wind that refuses prediction. It is a landscape stripped of romance, where the rhetoric of conquest collapses into the pragmatics of staying upright. When no harbour is visible, Haven suggests, the harbour must be internalised. This is not escapism but recalibration, and it resonates deeply with Mühlbauer’s long-standing refusal to treat fashion as declaration rather than dialogue.

Founded in Vienna in 1903, Mühlbauer has survived the convulsions of empire, modernism, industrialisation and digital acceleration by adhering to a deceptively simple principle: usefulness refined to the point of elegance. Under the creative direction of Nora Berger, Selma Klima and Klaus Mühlbauer, the brand has increasingly framed headwear as wearable architecture - micro-environments that support posture, perception and presence. Haven advances this logic with particular precision.

When shelter stops being a place. Dress accordingly. Even when you’re not sure what you’re facing.

The dominance of wool is central to the collection’s intelligence. Merino, virgin wool, dense wool felt and highly refined Japanese fabrics are chosen not for nostalgia but for their structural virtues. Wool insulates even when wet, regulates temperature across volatile conditions and recovers after stress. These are not qualities invented in laboratories but learned through centuries of exposure. In privileging them, Mühlbauer aligns itself with a lineage of vernacular knowledge, closer to the fisherman’s sweater or the mountaineer’s blanket than the rhetoric-heavy world of contemporary performance wear.

A quietly subversive gesture runs through the collection: hats appear to wear ribbed jumpers, a motif last explored in Mühlbauer’s 2005 collection. The effect is more than visual. It collapses the hierarchy between garment and accessory, suggesting continuity rather than layering. Gaston Bachelard once wrote that clothing can function as a form of shelter for the imagination; here, that idea becomes tactile. The head is not adorned but housed.

Maritime references are intentional yet unsentimental. Sailor attire has long oscillated in fashion between romance and parody, but Haven treats it as a system shaped by necessity. Clear lines and disciplined silhouettes establish order, while details such as pom-poms and dockers’ cuts are restored to their original logic. Pom-poms were not decorative; they protected sailors from injury below deck. Dockers’ caps end above the ears because hearing the environment mattered. In Haven, these elements are neither ironic nor nostalgic. They are simply correct.

Colour follows the same ethic. The palette draws from the compressed tones of sea and sky: navy, off-white, layered greys. When signal colours appear - orange, red - they function as communication rather than expression, recalling maritime visibility codes rather than fashion’s appetite for punctuation. Stripes, unavoidable in any nautical lexicon, act as rhythm rather than motif, reinforcing structure without spectacle.

What distinguishes Haven most sharply is its temperament. In a fashion landscape addicted to velocity, novelty and self-definition, Mühlbauer proposes safety as an aesthetic value and warmth as a form of care. This is not comfort as retreat, but comfort as condition. The collection speaks quietly to contemporary anxieties - climate volatility, fatigue, overstimulation - without aestheticising crisis or selling resilience as performance.

This approach is reinforced by Mühlbauer’s production ethos. Still made in Vienna, the brand’s hats emerge from a living craft culture rather than a frozen one. Sustainability here is embedded rather than announced: longevity over replacement, repair over disposal, material honesty over marketing narratives. The garments are expected to age, to absorb weather and wear, to accumulate meaning rather than depreciate.

Haven ultimately feels less like a collection than a state of being. It occupies the space between movement and rest, exposure and enclosure. There are echoes of Tarkovsky’s treatment of weather as psychological landscape, or of anthropologist Tim Ingold’s writing on dwelling as an ongoing negotiation rather than a fixed place. Mühlbauer’s hats do not promise mastery over uncertainty. They offer companionship within it.

In an era that confuses protection with armour and visibility with value, Haven makes a quieter claim. Shelter need not be monumental to be effective. The harbour does not always appear on the horizon. Sometimes, it is something you learn to wear.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Mühlbauer.