Head first

Fashion / Travel

 There’s no limit to artist Maryam Keyhani’s imagination as she sits at the drawing board, using her keen sense of fun and a feel for the absurd to sculpt traditional materials into surreal headwear.

 Missy lies stretched out on a wooden floor speckled with colourful splashes of paint and lets the morning sun shine on her silver-grey fur. Suddenly something catches her attention – a lace hatband dangling from a chair – and the svelte Persian cat stalks it, taking a well-aimed swipe. She is the latest addition to artist Maryam Keyhani’s family. It’s a good match: she not only shares her Persian origins with the lady of the house, whose flat in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg is both home and workplace, but both are also united by their playfulness. And, better still, Missy willingly wears a hat for the odd photo.

Keyhani sweeps into her studio wearing an off-the-shoulder corsage dress made from wild silk, Chanel ballerinas and, of course, a hat. Today she is modelling the black Cloud, a sweeping creation whose piled-up fabric and fluffy shape resembles a cumulus cloud. “It all started with this model,” says Keyhani, as she straightens a beaded fez displayed, like dozens of other hats, on the high walls. To her right is an easel and a shelf with her acrylic paints. “I studied art in Toronto, at the Ontario College of Art & Design,” she says, explaining how she still paints every day. Her works are colourful, naïve depictions of funny and sad pierrots and other circus personnel of her imagination: men in pointy caps, bow ties, ruffs and top hats; ladies with angular rococo décolletés, crinolines and hair piled dizzyingly high. “Painting is my profession and my passion,” she says.

It is not her only one: Keyhani has been designing hats for 10 years. Like her paintings, her bold and sculptural millinery is sold online and in her boutique, a former butcher’s shop just a few steps away from her studio. “At first, I just wanted to create a hat for myself,” she says. “One that would protect me. I designed it so that it would be so big that I could hide under it. But at the same time, of course, I knew that an accessory of this size would attract attention. But I can handle that,” she adds, pulling the large black hat down and letting her face disappear under the wide brim. “I don’t see you; you don’t see me.” The model is Keyhani’s favourite to this day. “Not least because it surprisingly became a hit,” she says. “A hat of that scale, I really didn’t expect it.” “All of my designs are characters and quasi-souled,” says

the artist. Cloud is made with a variety of materials: in summer, from a technical synthetic fibre that has proved particularly suitable as it defies light rain; in winter, from woollen pepita and faux fur. 

Not all of the hats that adorn the walls like trophies are Keyhani’s but the lushest, largest ones bear her signature. One design from the Soufflé series, a wedding cake-like construction made of pale pink straw, is a good 40cm high. Next to it is a so-called Yves Boater; a flatter straw hat also known as a circular saw; and a double-boater, with a second one perched on top. “Sometimes you need that extra hat,” she says with a wink. 

Then there are her surreal headpieces: hairband constructions reminiscent of Napoleon’s bicorne and fascinators made from straw that would have delighted her idol, stylist and hat lover Isabella Blow. 

Maryam Keyhani was born in Tehran and lived there until she was 13, before her parents emigrated with her to Toronto. In her student days, she met her husband, Ali Karbassi, an Iranian who had grown up in Germany and California and was doing his mba at a business university. “My father was a painter, my mother a social worker in an orphanage – I had little to do with business until then,” says Keyhani. “Life in Canada was good but it was a lot about money and prestige: the Land Rover, the house with a garden, the gold credit card. You were quickly pigeonholed if you didn’t share those values. We didn’t want to expose ourselves to that pressure.” 

On one of their many visits to Berlin, the couple sat on a restaurant terrace in the Prenzlauer Berg district. The adults were drinking wine, the children were playing on a swing. They looked at each other and agreed: “This is the perfect place to raise children.” 

In 2013, Keyhani and Karbassi moved to Germany. At about the same time, she started designing her first hats. “In Berlin you can really wear what you want – no one looks at you askance,” says Keyhani. This feeling of freedom inspired her. In the following years, more and more designs were added, though Keyhani admits that she is not a classic milliner. “I can paint for 12 hours straight, no problem, but I’m simply too impatient for all the other craft activities,” she says. 

Instead, she searched for craftsmen to realise her ideas and found them in her former home of Toronto, in Philadelphia, the US and Florence. “All of my textile designs are produced in Toronto,” she says of a category that includes hats, headpieces, dresses and capes. (Here, too, Keyhani’s looks are opulent and expansive; metres of heavy silk flowing into floor-length gowns.) 

Keyhani has found a production facility for the Soufflé hats in Philadelphia. Making them is a laborious process. “I sit next to the seamstress,” she says. “She sews the narrow straw bands together inch by inch, working her way up. I dictate where on the hat a bead should be incorporated.” The more classic straw hats are made in Florence, at a family business that can look back on more than 60 years of tradition. Production costs, including import duties, are high but Keyhani accepts that. “I also feel responsible for my suppliers; I could never let them down.” 

Keyhani didn’t train as a hat designer. “I see that as an absolute advantage,” she says. “I just think of something and then find someone who can make it happen.” 

After the hats were enthusiastically received, she started designing sunglasses – another accessory that is both discreet and eye-catching. One model has a red and white pierrot diamond pattern, another is in the shape of a butterfly, inspired by the eccentric Peggy Guggenheim. “Even as a child, I liked to throw myself into fantasy worlds as an escape from reality,” says Keyhani. “In my early youth in Iran, I did what all the girls of my generation did: what we were told. Everything else was beyond our imagination. This led me to seek a way out of the fear of oppression for years. My artworks, and my hats, are meant to convey lightness and bring joy. For this, I have created my own cosmos.” And the Maryam Keyhani universe continues to expand: over the past few months, her brand has also started producing candlesticks, larger-than-life sugar bowls, vases and coloured wine glasses with white glass ruffs. But for all her delight in playing with form and colour, escapism is far from Keyhani’s mind today. The artist is also politically active. “Recent events in Iran have moved me to express myself personally,” she says. Keyhani does so on social media but also with written banners that she made for an exhibition at Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art in summer 2023. 

“It’s a fine line between social-media posts about the political situation in Iran and wanting to bring joy to the world,” she says, explaining how she feels about the moral responsibility that comes with success. She also has suggestions for Berlin that could make her adopted city even better. “Berlin is full of great playgrounds,” she says. “But I’d love it if they didn’t just invite climbing and romping.” Instead, Keyhani has places in mind where children can rest. “Larger-than-life walk-in hats that have a locker for mobile phones on the outside and colouring equipment on the inside. The children could take time out and go in search of themselves and their own imagination.” Keyhani smiles; there is no limit to her creativity – and to the liberating potential of big hats.

Konfekt,
Winter 23/24