A stuffed alligator made for Gigi by her friend/assistant.

Gigi Burris, the sunny designer behind a millinery line of the same name, grew up in gator country, and her dad is one of her main suppliers of the skins, which she uses season-to-season as accents on hats, headbands, and, more recently, to make thin little bracelets. “My parents have orange groves, and my dad usually finds the gators there,” she says. “He tries to give me one or two per year—they’re huge, like eight feet long.” Here, a tour of some of the skins she’s been using and what she’s learned working with the material.

“We take my dad’s skins to a tannery in Florida. It’s about making sure that when you shoot it, you put it on ice relatively fast. With the tannery, there’s a lead time of two to three months, and you can pick the color and all that. My dad tried to do a DIY redneck job in the backyard once—to dry the skin himself. It was stinky and rotting.”

Gigi Burris of Gigi Burris

“Florida gators are really big. We have so much phosphate in the water that they end up having really large scales. ”

“I also order skins from a tannery, and they tend to be smaller and softer. This is from Thailand, where a lot of alligators come from. The prettiest part of the gator is the belly.”

“I made this as a summer hat for myself—it’s straw with an alligator band. It’s funny—it is a really small group of people who work with that material, so it’s cool that it’s so close to me and my home.”