The Designer Reimagining America’s Most Iconic Accessory

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/t-magazine/rodney-patterson-esenshel.html

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Growing up in mid-South Side Chicago in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Rodney Patterson often dreamed of making avant-garde clothing like the fashion designers Rei Kawakubo and Jean-Paul Gaultier. While a career creating high-end clothes might have been seen as a long shot at that time for a black man from the Midwest, Patterson expressed his love of fashion through his own personal style — especially his hats. After moving to New York in the late ’80s — where he worked as a visual merchandiser by day and designed Judy Jetson-like dresses for his own independent women’s wear label at night — he would punctuate his outfits with exuberant headwear: the exaggerated Philip Treacy fedora popularized by Boy George, with its slanted brim and angular crown, or Vivienne Westwood’s dramatically oversize Buffalo hat.

But it wasn’t until the early 2010s that he began making his own designs. “I would buy Western hats from the store, then I’d take them to this guy in SoHo, who’d transform them into whatever shape I liked,” the 57-year-old says, standing in the white-walled apartment in downtown Manhattan where he lives and works. He chose cowboy hats, he explains, for their towering crowns (some measure up to eight inches), but he would flatten the brim and remove adornments like feathers and colorful ribbons to create an elegant, minimalist piece that defied conventions of shape and proportion. “People would stop me on the street and ask me where I got my hat,” he says. It started to happen so often that he began his own business.

Esenshel, Patterson’s brand of handmade hats, launched in 2014. Its name is derived from the phonetic spelling of “essential.” “I don’t think my hats are necessarily essential,” he says as he holds up one of his best-selling high-crowned Acorn hats, named for their resemblance to the fruit of an oak tree. “But they are always rooted in some sort of classic hat style, so there is something familiar about them.” The Acorn is one of the few styles he makes, with some variations, every season, and the version in his hands is meant for warm weather: light and airy, made from ivory-colored sewn hemp. But while the hat takes inspiration from those worn by the Canadian Mounted Police, Patterson has shrunken the brim and stretched the crown to a sky-scraping 12 inches.

Patterson started selling his designs through Instagram, but they’re now sold alongside luxury brands like Maison Margiela and Junya Watanabe at the boutique IF in New York’s SoHo. His creations have also been worn by entertainers such as Lizzo, who chose a custom red felt Western hat by Esenshel to wear in the music video for her 2019 song “Tempo.” In signature Esenshel fashion, the crown is taller and more pointed than is usual, and the curvature of the brim is strikingly sharp; Patterson’s innovations helped elevate Lizzo’s red rodeo look from pastiche into something more powerful. “I have always liked hats for their transformative nature,” he says. “You can have on clothing, but if you throw on a hat, you are now wearing an outfit.”

Despite Patterson’s newfound success — in December he will release Esenshel’s first resort collection, as well as a line of unisex totes — his career as a designer has not been easy. As a teen in Chicago, his stay-at-home mother and police officer father did not encourage his ambition to work in fashion, he says, “due to the lack of known black designers.” After a stint at Chicago State University studying agricultural marketing, he worked as a visual merchandiser at the now-defunct Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, and in 1989, after the emergence of black designers like Patrick Kelly and Willi Smith, he relocated to New York with the support of his family. There, he created elaborate retail displays for major brands while launching several independent clothing ventures, all short-lived.

With Esenshel, though, Patterson seems to have found the perfect vehicle for his talents. When the actor and entertainer Billy Porter wanted a showstopping hat with a 22-inch brim for the season premiere event of his hit series “Pose,” or the stylist June Ambrose was looking for a Western hat with a subtle, funky twist to wear during fashion week, they knew to call up Patterson. Recently, Jennifer Lopez wore an eight-inch-tall Esenshel hat in Milan that one magazine enthusiastically compared to a traffic cone. For Patterson, this extremity is the source of his brand’s appeal. “If you want a hat like that,” he says, “I’m the only place you can get it.”