Check Your Head
Art-driven T-shirts captured the imagination of fashionistas during the past couple of seasons, but is the world ready for the art-driven hat?
Satoshi Kurihara thinks so. He opened 700-square-foot Arth on Aug. 26 at The Lab in Costa Mesa, Calif., based on this sartorial gamble. He may be onto something because his gambit already worked in Japan. His family’s business, the Osakabased Kurihara Corp., owns 26 stores in Japan that sell the company’s art-hat labels, Override 9999 and Milsa.
Override 9999 specializes in nearly-oneof- a-kind hats that sometimes have runs of only 10 items. Kurihara’s designers also use unusual materials to construct their chapeaus, such as furniture upholstery and vintage fabric.
The clash of sensibilities results in hats that would be classified as “alternative” if they were CDs stocked in a music store. Consider the Override fedora that mixes the shape and fit of a city slicker’s fedora with a simple, colorful fabric design reminiscent of an Andean farmer. Baseball hats are as basic as a blue version bearing the Override logo or as complex as a ragged safari style with rustic rings hung on the brim. Price points are $30 to $180.
These head coverings are also sold in Fred Segal Hats at Fred Segal Santa Monica and at American Rag in Los Angeles.
Kurihara has no immediate plans to build more stores—he’s concentrating on making a name for his Costa Mesa store. It’s covered floor to ceiling in polished blond hardwood planks. The grand opening naturally featured sushi along with indie-rock and free-jazz records played by DJ Jasper, who also happens to be a warehouse manager at Costa Mesa–based Paul Frank Industries.
Kurihara spent the party greeting the crowd of Orange County locals who dropped by for the sushi and hats. He hoped they would see the wider artistic possibilities of headwear.
“It’s not just a hat,” he said. —Andrew Asch
