A New Home For Williamsburg’s Mad Hattresses

A return to artisan craftsmanship has hit Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hard, from the butchers at Marlow & Sons restaurant (where discarded skins are now turned into leather handbags, too) to the Mast Brothers’ small-scale chocolate factory. Now Molly Yestadt of Yestadt Millinery is, ahem, throwing her hat into the ring. Her newly launched atelier on South 6th Street is giving customers a chance to see her handiwork in action. “Initially, the concept was to have a workshop that could be visited by appointment only,” says Yestadt. But, the hats on view in the floor-to-ceiling shelving that dominates the Harlequin-themed space aren’t solely for display. Yestadt Millinery’s ground-floor abode—built at the turn of the century and entirely transformed thanks to a heavy dose of “elbow grease, blood, and sweat”—will likewise double as a custom hat shop. The idea is “to come, to work with us, and let us guide you through the process so as to make it something special and wonderful,” says Yestadt, who has crafted caps for the runways of Vena Cava, Thom Browne, and Marc Jacobs and found fans in Rihanna and Leighton Meester.

For the summer, Yestadt notes she and partner Jane Pincus have been doing well with wide-brimmed toppers. For fall, another presentation and a few more collaborations—all, for the moment, kept mum. Well, except for this preview, delivered with the usual Williamsburghian brio: “Hopefully there’ll be some really awesome, creative shit. I’m ready to go wild.”

Yestadt Millinery is open by appointment only; e-mail contact@yestadtmillinery.com to make an appointment.

—Alisa Gould-Simon