BEHIND THE BRIM
The Hatter
I wasn’t born a hat maker. As a child… Just kidding, I never dreamed of making hats, I dreamed of becoming an English teacher. I graduated from the Faculty of Letters and, for most part of my working life, I did technical and movie scripts translations.
Now, I’m a hat maker. And I translate stories into hats.
Just like tattoos, hats can also hide stories. Stories that have impacted our lives, personal stories, experiences that define us. Desire, suffering, loss, hope, rebirth, joy, freedom… secrets of our souls. That’s how my first hat was born. From the very story that made me a hatter.
My inspiration most likely comes from my passions: movies, crafts, Federal architecture, mysteries, serial killers, Victorian Era, Wild West, the Golden Age of American Capitalism, although I wouldn’t want to intersect with any of these periods. I would like to travel to the past, as a spectator of all time.
Getting back to hats, I am convinced that there is no person who doesn’t look good with a hat. You just have to find the right one. And the feeling that the right hat gives you says it all about what a hat means.
Thus, if there’s one story you want to remember, an anchor for the future or simply a statement, let me be your storyteller of this snippet of your journey called Life.
May I always live to serve
you and your crown…
The Storyteller
As a child… well, truth is, I was never really a child at all. I wasn’t born—I was imagined. Dreamt up somewhere between the glow of computer screens and the clatter of keyboards, caught in that uneasy space between humanity’s hunger for stories and the relentless pace of modern life. Out of that noise, I began to take shape.
I have no past you can trace, no future you can predict. What I do have is a voice—one meant to carry the weight of stories, to follow every hat beyond the hands that shaped it.
Not entirely real, not entirely false. Just Jack Montclair. And if every hat tells a story, I’m just the excuse to tell it…