Turning Heads

Eugenia Kim sips chardonnay by the window in the lounge at the Hotel Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica. It’s drizzling this afternoon, but the view is quintessential L.A: endless blond sand, blue ocean and desolate pier with its lights blinking into the wet haze. Kim, wearing a saucer-sized red beret to one side of her bleached bob, says the scene reminds her of “The Great Gatsby” and lights a cigarette, looking for a moment like one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creations.

If, as the author wrote, “personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” then Kim has struck out. Two astonished employees, who spot her lighting up, sweep her out the doors. By the time she reenters, she has become The Smoker. As she refastens her mini-beret to her now damp bleached bob, Kim notices that people in the lobby are watching her with curiosity. A front desk attendant roots through a drawer and proffers a cigarette of his own. Dropping the donation into her pocket, she returns to her table, an accidental criminal. Or a brand-new celebrity.

She’s quitting soon, she says, but a law against smoking? “Where am I?” Kim, the 28-year old, Korean American “It girl” of millinery, is described as a “genius” and affectionately, as a “basket case” by those who know her. Sarah Brown, Vogue’s beauty editor, who met Kim during their summer together at the Radcliffe Publishing Course, admits that “when people meet Eugenia for the first time, it isn’t always apparent how smart she is. She seems whimsical and nutty. But, she’s drawing on a wealth of literary and cultural influences.”

The oldest daughter of Korean immigrants, Kim grew up in Pittsburgh and attended Dartmouth, where she took premed classes and was infamous for wearing hot pink instead of the Ivy League uniform of preppy pullovers and duck boots. Much to her parents’ chagrin, Kim switched her major to psychology and later decided to become a literary editor.

After graduation, she attended the prestigious five-week Radcliffe Publishing Course, where students make connections and enjoy “sherry hour” with some of the biggest figures in the industry. After arriving in New York, Kim landed a job at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Glamour and other magazines as a “rover”--assisting at any publication that needed her. She was fired, however, for “being disorganized,” and, say Conde Nast insiders, “for leaving the office at all times for sample sales.”

Kim’s stint at Conde Nast instilled in her, if not order, at least an unquenchable interest in fashion. Then 23, she enrolled in a hat design course at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and poured her energy into creating. “There were hat farms all over our apartment,” recalls her then-roommate, Ava Scanlon. “We were finally kicked out because she was spray-sizing in the apartment, in the halls, outside, everywhere.”

That first year, Kim had a taste of success, albeit one with no commercial value. “She was spray-painting Mohawk headbands,” Scanlon says, “ugly, fluorescent orange things, and Gen Art [a collective of young artists] displayed them even though no one wanted to buy them.” Putting that look behind her, Kim, who describes herself as obsessive and compulsive, knew when she was onto something with a new design when she wore it on the street and people stopped her to ask where she’d bought the hat. That year, 1997, she founded her eponymous design firm, which now sells to stores in Tokyo, Paris and London.

These days, magazine editors, celebrity stylists and Hollywood stars count themselves among her fans. Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Kidman, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Connelly, Cuba Gooding, Janet Jackson and Dave Mathews have been glimpsed in Kim’s classic cloches, soft leather newsboys or eccentric fedoras. Yunnie Kim, the owner of Fred Segal Tiara, Santa Monica, calls the hats “special pieces that sell to a special clientele.” Though Tiara is a jewelry store, people come for the hats, often purchasing three or four at a time, for $75 to $1,100 a piece. “

Now 28, and an established designer, Kim has discovered her biggest fans in Los Angeles. This year, she says, L.A. shoppers have bought her hats at nearly three times the rate in New York, previously her largest market. L.A. boutiques such Fred Segal Tiara, Curve and Diavolina have increased orders, particularly of the silk newsboys and straw sun hats.

“A lot of times, you feel like a wacko wearing a hat in L.A,” says Sarah Stewart, women’s buyer of Maxfield, who recently placed the store’s first order with Kim. “That’s why people here like the newsboy. It’s casual and cool.” Donna Nunley, a sales associate at Curve says that the straw hats and newsboy caps sold as soon as they hit shelves. “They [customers] hear we’re carrying Eugenia Kim hats and they come in--just for that.”

In the last few years, Kim’s work has been sought for runway shows by designers, including Donna Karan, Cynthia Rowley, Catherine Malandrino, Alice Roi and Alvin Valley, among others. Roi says Kim is extremely creative and hard-working. Valley calls her pieces “classic, elegant, urban, edgy.”

Much of her work evokes a classic 1920s spirit. Kim admits that the reference is intentional. “I admire that era because it was a really feminist time,” she says. “Women had a lot more freedom, intellectually and otherwise,” than they’d ever experienced before. They won the right to vote and became more active, playing golf and tennis.

Hats, without which a lady didn’t dare go out, adapted accordingly. Wide brims were pulled in tighter, the fabric softened, and the decorations grew subtler and less ornate. Or, as Kim says: “Twenties hats were more beautiful, flattering and less encumbering than the heavy ones of the Victorian era.”

Kim also believes that the ‘20s resonate with her generation. The young people of World War I experienced conflicting feelings of disillusionment, self-indulgence, moral reevaluation and especially, hope. The time held, as Fitzgerald wrote, “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.”

The designer recalls feeling a similar range of emotions in the wake of Sept. 11. “I started thinking about my role in society--I was feeling useless--and I watched the people in my shop, and I realized that hats make people happy, and that’s important right now. Hats are about fantasy.”

She recently created a whole collection of hats based on Gatsby’s fictional borough, West Egg. She inscribed text on a ribbon encircling the hats’ crowns. “Whatever shall we do this afternoon?” reads one in old-fashioned courier font. One leather cloche is cut to look like traditional flapper hair, with yolk-like yellow and white dripping over the edge of one cheek--a playful presentation of West Egg.

Emma Forrest, a British novelist and owner of several Eugenia Kim originals, says she loves the “mad, genuinely inspiring” hats Kim spins out. “I imagine her ideas as curly,” Forrest says, “and coming directly out of the top of her head into these big, crazy hats.” Kim, who recognized the name on Forrest’s credit card when the author shopped at her store, ultimately asked Forrest to collaborate on a project that would wrap her words around beaver felt fedoras.

“I had sex with my roommate’s boyfriend against the wall outside her bedroom ... I refused to take my hat off,” reads the bestselling hat of the bunch, penned in graffiti by Forrest--on a flattened snake. “It looks like a ribbon,” Kim says of the snake. “It isn’t at all gruesome. In fact, Nicole Kidman bought one without the graffiti.”

Now she is offering a number of beaver and felt cloches with black leather ruching and--take a deep breath--a white mink’s head with a tiny red bow near its ear. “Cute!” exclaimed one retailer when she spied the hat at an April trade show at downtown’s New Mart.

Kim’s most expensive hats literally make use of whole animals. “Utilizing a fox’s entire head, with legs on one side and tail on the other,” Kim says. “I eliminate a lot of waste. No one uses these parts, and I don’t like that they’re thrown away.” Where would such a thing sell? “They love it in Japan.”

Last year, Kim discovered in a Manhattan vintage store some preserved beetles from the 1920s. Sealing them in a glaze of polyurethane, she fastened the bugs to hats last fall. This spring, the bugs are woman-made.

This grande modiste’s personal favorite? A hat based on Sanrio’s “Hello Kitty,” constructed of white felt, black leather whiskers and topped with a red silk bow. (The face is set on the wearer’s head at an angle.) Though Sanrio’s image is often derided as misogynistic--the female cat has no mouth--Kim considers the character “the ultimate, Asian feminist.”

For her, the cat’s power is passive aggressive: “‘I’m going to get what I want through feminine wiles,’ which is what, of course, a cat is,” she explains. “I’m not saying it’s right. But, it’s power, and a lot of women do it.” Kim loves the design because it is a perfect circle, because it looks a bit like her logo, and because “it makes everyone who sees it happy.”

How could it be that Angelenos, known for their sun worshipping, are leading the hat pack? “A hat is drama,” Kim says. “Everybody wants to be the life of the party sometimes.” Maybe we’re all a little bit like, “Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, [who] sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”