At his Venice Beach studio, hatmaker Nick Fouquet dreams up creations beloved by everyone from Madonna and Pharrell Williams to Tom Brady and Bob Dylan.
Nick Fouquet is six foot three, with sandy hair, water-blue eyes, and a symmetrical smile that drops into a steely gaze if the lens demands it. He looks like he was made to wear hats – the kind of elegant shapes you might see cutting through a crowd at a concert, or on a field in the American West, or on a mysterious figure striding down a city street. And for more than a decade, his Los Angeles-based brand has been synonymous with a unique blend of headwear craftsmanship: it applies a rugged artfulness and fashion sensibility to America’s most utilitarian accessory.
In fact, it was a cowboy-like figure, walking down the streets of Venice, who piqued Fouquet’s interest in hatmaking. The designer had moved to the beachside town on the outskirts of Los Angeles in 2009 after a year ski-bumming in Aspen, a stretch in New York, college in Florida, and a childhood in the southwest of France (“It was art meets crime,” he says of Venice at the time). Fouquet asked the cowboy where he got his hat – a bone-colored western style – and the man replied that he’d made it, describing the process of steaming felt on mahogany poplar blocks. “He was like… it’s been done for hundreds of years, and there’s 30 to 40 people who do it in this traditional way,” Fouquet recalls. “I said, ‘I want to be number 41.’” In 2010, he invested $15,000 of his own money, bought some equipment, set up in a garage basement, recruited craftsmen to train him, and “started tinkering.”
Back then, Fouquet posited that luxury headwear was beautiful but staid. “I’d see hat brands in Europe doing black grosgrain, grey grosgrain. So I started experimenting with contrast and stitching, and playing around with this undervalued category.” Fouquet formulated his own distressing agent, used fabrics as trimming, added unexpected stitching details, had intricate illustrations on the liner, and tucked a signature matchstick into each style’s exterior band. Word spread. “There’s this guy across the street making hats in the basement,” he says.
Rock stars Billy Gibbons and Jakob Dylan, plus Japanese journalists, were among the early visitors to the underground space. In 2014, the Grammy Awards catapulted Fouquet’s business onto television, and a different sphere entirely. There, Pharrell Williams wore a custom mocha-colored pinch-front felt hat from the designer while performing with Daft Punk; that same night Madonna sang Open Your Heart in a white Ralph Lauren suit topped with a crisp white cowboy hat from Fouquet. Hats are prime real estate (“No one notices the shoes,” Fouquet says), and celebrities and retailers came calling.
“Then Colette hits,” he recalls, of the Parisian boutique that set taste levels in the 2000s. Shops around the globe were putting in orders Fouquet’s small enterprise couldn’t accommodate, “which weirdly made them say ‘I want it more.’” The designer took on key accounts: Barneys New York, Trois Pommes in Switzerland, Isetan in Japan, while making the case for the value proposition of his work, which can cost up to $2,000 per piece and take up to five months to complete. “You guys sell $3,000 shoes, $5,000 dresses, and you have $150 hats in here,” he remembers telling buyers. “And that doesn’t make sense for ours, the way we do it, the hand craftsmanship.”
In addition to showing two collections a year in Paris, Fouquet has a thriving custom business, evidenced by his 2,400-square-foot Venice workshop (behind his large store footprint on Abbot Kinney Blvd.), with stacks and stacks of band blocks – wooden circles cut to the exact dimensions of a wearer’s head. Each is labeled with a client’s name (including, in no certain order, Tom Brady, Bob Dylan, Pierce Brosnan and Chet Hanks). “We sit down, and it’s really important for me to get to know them,” says Fouquet. “Backstory, eye color, facial structure, height, hair. Is this a hat to go to the beach once in a while, is it every day?” Even within his main collection, whose wearers he won’t interview personally, he treats each style as a character with a backstory, and a name. Perhaps you’re a Lucky Luc? Maybe you’re a Cachet, a Desert Oracle?
High fashion, of course, has taken note. In 2020, Clare Waight Keller tapped Fouquet to design headwear for her Givenchy Menswear FW20/21 collection. “A feather in my cap – no pun intended,” he quips. Several rounds of collaborations with Jacques Marie Mage, Enfants Riches Déprimés, and Lucchese have followed, the latter well timed to “The Yellowstone effect,” says Fouquet. “Everyone wanted to play cowboy.” Now, however, the designer finds himself returning to some of the shapes and silhouettes that started his brand, working with European hare, Beaver felt, and Ecuadorian straw. “I’ve gotten back to a place today where I’m going back to the simplicity of it as much as I can,” he says. “I don’t want to make shit that’s theatrical.”
His inspiration for what’s next can come from anywhere. SS27 started with Argentine gauchos, before a conversation with his father made him refocus the aesthetic on his childhood in France, and alfresco dinners set beautifully with linen and limoges. California, too, remains a constant muse. “I think, in a lot of ways, LA is the creative center of the world.”
Taken from 10 Men USA Issue 2 – HERITAGE, LEGACY, FUTURE – out Now! Order your copy here.
Photographer PAUL MCLEAN
Fashion Editor DAN MAY
Text MOLLY CREEDEN
Instagram: @nickfouquet
nickfouquet.com
