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Text by Joseph M. Schuster
Twenty years ago, Ignatius Creegan was a stained-glass artist in Richmond,
Virginia, who found that his studio—a three-story loft in a structure shaped
like a giant milk bottle, located outside a dairy—was drafty. “So I made a fur
hat for myself to stay warm,” he says. Then he made another…and another. “I
realized no one was making hats anymore. People no longer wore them the way they
used to, and all the hat makers were dying off.” He started selling hats at
street fairs and to a local theater’s costume department. Then the Radio City
Rockettes placed an order. Soon, he was supporting himself through what others
considered a dying art. A decade later, artist-friend Rod Givens joined him to
form a company they called Ignatius Hats.
Ignatius (in striped tee) and Rod use antique sewing machines like the one up top
(a). “Hats aren’t as popular as they once were, so you can’t find new
equipment,” Rod says. (b) A pagoda hat by Ignatius.
(c) Ignatius based this sassy chapeau on a ‘20s design. (d) One
of Rod’s “hummingbird” hats, made from scraps of straw left over from other
creations. “We named it that because of the Native American myth that the
hummingbird came from the scraps of other birds,” Ignatius says.
Men In Hats page
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