The quiet residential community of Beverly is hardly the first place in Chicago one would expect to find an upscale men’s hat shop. Yet tucked in along a busy stretch of South Western Avenue across from a Midas brake shop is Optimo Hat Co., a small emporium with an Old World feel and a collection of some of the finest hand-blocked men’s hats in the country. l Optimo’s vintage glass cases are filled with variations of rakish fedoras, elegant homburgs and dapper derbies, trimmed with fine grosgrain ribbons and the occasional feather. Behind the cases are three racks of wooden hat blocks, the tools of the trade used to create Optimo’s toppers.
As unusual as its location is the man behind Optimo: Graham Thompson, a 29-year-old who grew up in Chicago’s western suburbs, long after most men stopped wearing hats, and who became fascinated with headgear when he was just a teenager.
“I’ve always loved hats. I loved the ’40s feel of them,” says Thompson, who opened Optimo seven years ago after graduating from college in Hawaii. “I’ve been wearing a fedora since I was 12.”
Back in 1994, Thompson was planning to become a stockbroker in Chicago when his life took an unusual turn. He heard that Johnny Tyus, one of the area’s last master hatters, was planning to close his men’s hat shop at 79th Street and Racine in Auburn-Gresham.
Thompson immediately junked his career plans and cut a deal with Tyus to buy the contents of his shop. In addition to letting Thompson spread his payments over time, Tyus agreed to teach him the art of hatmaking. Thompson’s parents, who build custom homes in Oak Brook and Hinsdale, were supportive of his venture, but also a little worried.
“I went heavily into debt in a business everybody thought was crazy, and I was making a product nobody wants,” he says now with a laugh.
But people did want Thompson’s hats, even his early efforts.
Jazz and blues musicians, Chicago police detectives and FBI agents now constitute some of the biggest fans of Optimo’s hats, which start at about $350. One Panama hat made from a super-fine Montecristi straw that took Ecuadoran craftsmen two years to weave retails for a cool $15,000.
Thompson’s customers know they’re making a fashion statement when they don hats these days, and that’s fine with them. Tony Putis, a detective with the Chicago Police Department, says his affection for hats goes back to childhood and ties in with his love for film noir from the 1940s and ’50s.
“When I was growing up, my dad had a tavern, and you’d meet these detectives, and they wore hats. It’s just something I wanted to continue,” Putis says. Sometimes showing up in a fedora breaks the ice when he is interviewing potential witnesses, he adds.
A few guys aren’t above making fun of Putis’ hat collection, but most people admire it. “It’s a trademark,” he says. Some acquaintances are even disappointed if the detective shows up hatless.
Still, Putis and Optimo’s other customers are definitely in the minority these days. For most men, hat-wearing ended the day a bare-headed John F. Kennedy took the presidential oath of office in January 1961. Kennedy, of course, was flaunting convention for a reason: He had great hair and he was trying to appeal to the country’s youth, who were beginning to reject their parents’ ideas of formal dressing.
“That was a defining moment,” says Mark-Evan Blackman, chairman of the menswear department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “When people saw he was not wearing a hat, it killed the men’s hat business. Sales plummeted by 80 or 90 percent.”
Detroit automakers didn’t help the situation either, lowering the roofs of cars in the 1960s until men could no longer comfortably keep their hats on when driving.
Not everyone abandoned hats, however. Black men, in particular, continued to wear them, whether the occasion was a church service or a dinner out. “Within the black community, we have always been more formal and dressed because class means more among blacks than whites,” Blackman says. “It makes perfect sense [that] black men are willing to spend big bucks on hats.”
And it’s good news for Thompson, who inherited most of his early African-American clientele from Tyus. They were demanding customers who knew how they wanted their hat brims to look. “The customers here were so picky. They knew quality hats,” Thompson says
One famous customer was blues great John Lee Hooker, who was so proud of his collection of homburgs that he had his name embroidered in his Optimo hat bands.
Now hats are slowly spreading beyond the black community again, and Optimo’s growing customer list reflects that trend. Some of the newest converts are young men who grew up in an era when their fathers and uncles didn’t wear hats, Thompson has noticed.
As his business has grown, so has Thompson’s willingness to take some fashion risks. For fall, he is making hats in serious colors: chocolate browns, medium sky blues and dark olive greens that appear almost black.
Thompson could be a case study for the best-selling book “Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow.” His business turned cash-positive in 1996, and he now travels the world inspecting felts and exploring dye formulas that will rival those used in the hatmaking heydays of the 1930s and ’40s. “I’m always on a treasure hunt,” he says.
He no longer lives above the shop. In fact, he, his wife and their 2-year-old son live downtown on the lake. But while he dreams of having the perfect small shop on Oak Street, Thompson realizes that keeping costs down in Beverly has been a major factor in his success.
Rather than moving Optimo downtown, he is planning to ramp up production at his current location to expand his wholesale business to clients such as Nordstrom.
In addition to his four assistants, Thompson is bringing a friend on board in October to help him with manufacturing. He now makes about six hats a day and plans to double his output. Eventually, through the use of some vintage hatmaking equipment, he hopes to be able to whip up two or three dozen a day. But if the quality ever suffers, he promises to stop.
“I love making hats. I love it,” he says. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
