When a Hat Is More Than a Hat

Dryce Lahssan loves to talk fashion. “A good look is a good look but clothes are nothing without a conversation behind them,” he says, calling from Paris. Naturally, his new collaboration with the Ukrainian hat and accessory designer Ruslan Baginskiy started with a long exchange. “Ruslan and I started our conversation by nudging each other on Instagram until we got on a phone call,” Lahssan explains. “The war had already started, and we had a very deep conversation about the importance of fashion and beauty.”

Fashion, Lahssan argues, is “something that comes very quickly after your primal needs.” “The first thing we need is food, the second may be shelter, then company, and eventually you get to clothing. It makes us human, it makes us civilized.” For Lahssan, the partnership was a way of reminding Baginskiy of the importance of what he does. “Because when you’re in your country at war and you hear all the bad news, it’s very difficult to stick to fashion,” he says. “Fashion is resistance.”

The partnership features two hats that sit with Lahssan’s singular trench coat, and they’re available now at both his Paris boutique and Baginskiy’s e-commerce site. The first is a baker-boy cap with a vinyl visor and satin top, and the second is a double-faced bucket hat, one side being vinyl and the other satin. Both feature a hand-stitched “RxL” logo created for the collaboration. “Some people dress in a certain way to get people to talk to them, and some people dress in a certain way so people won’t talk to them,” says Lahssan, “but they speak a language with fashion.” The hats, equally versatile and specific, allow Lahssan to offer his ethos to his customer: “Reserved or provocative, she can be a spy, a flirt, whatever she wants.”

“I’m having a great time with my little saloon, but I want to grow,” Lahssan says of the boutique he opened in 2020, “I love that I only have one product in my shop, and I would like to stick to the trench coat, but I am okay with accessories, I’m okay with the adjacent product that makes up the Lahssan woman.”