Behind 100 “Dad Hats”: A Designer Digging Into Social Questions, and Four Hatmakers in Putian

“Interesting” — but what is the interesting part? The hats made from counterfeit dad shoes, the idea behind them, or the assorted people who made the hat possible?

In October, a strange exhibition opened at Poly Time, a mall that had opened in Shanghai's Xujiahui district late the previous year. It was a two-story space, with a dozen-odd pairs of fake shoes on display at the entrance. On a nearby wall hung photographs of street signs from Putian, Fujian: “Yeezy Trefoil,” “China New Balance,” “Yeezy Popcorn,” “Wise Big-Mouth Monkey.”

“Popcorn” is the nickname for E-TPU (expanded thermoplastic polyurethane), the key material in the soles of Adidas's BOOST line. Say “popcorn” and anyone who buys sneakers knows you roughly mean Adidas BOOST. Some local shoemakers in Putian like to mix and match these hot words at random into new brand names. That way a trademark application clears review and rides the hype at the same time.

The second floor of the exhibition space was divided in two: one side held two collections previously released by the hat brand Cloud Hat System (CHS), the other hung with documentary photographs. In the photos, the counterfeit-shoe sellers Putian locals call “A Mao” drive out into the night in small trucks or sedans. They lean against open trunks, baseball caps pulled low, smoke curling under the brims, piles of colorful shoeboxes at their feet.

Performance artist Jiang Fan opened the unveiling of the dad hats with a piece in the Live space on the first floor. The small installations scattered around the room were made by CHS founder Zhang Tingting out of objects she had collected in Putian — traditional wood carvings, stone carvings and oil lanterns of the sort common there, glued together with fake shoes.

A large ring of white balloons hung in the center of the space, each balloon printed with a label-like phrase: “High-Quality Fakes,” “Made In Putian,” “Cheap.” Jiang Fan stroked the installations, spun inside the ring, struggled, tried to break out. The cord snapped and the balloons scattered across the floor.

It was a contemporary art show, a collage of anthropological material, and a hat launch and sale, all at once.

The new hats launched that day were called “dad hats.” The name comes from “dad shoes,” the retro sneakers made famous by the luxury brand Balenciaga. But that is not the point. The point is that the hats are made entirely out of dad shoes — fake ones.

The hatmakers took the counterfeit dad shoes apart piece by piece: rubber soles, mesh uppers, the red-and-blue or yellow-and-green fabric of the vamps, laces — then put the pieces back together in the shape of a hat. The brims came in left-facing and right-facing versions, so a customer trying one on could see which side of the face it looked better covering.

Where these materials came from is as delicate a subject as Putian's sneakers themselves. Early this year, Balenciaga told a buyer in an email that it planned to move production of its hit Triple S — the dad shoe — from Italy to Putian, China. The price would stay at US$850. Some fans protested. Balenciaga explained at the time that the move was only because Putian had the technology to make the shoe lighter.

People in Putian are a long way from any of that talk. Local taxi drivers, whatever their passengers have come for, will tell them straight out what the city sells: if you want to pick up goods, go to Anfu Market; if you want raw materials, there's a materials market on the east side of town.

That is how Zhang Tingting found the raw material for the dad hats. All of it came from knockoff Balenciaga dad shoes she bought at Anfu Market, took apart and reassembled. Besides the CHS logo, each hat carried the name of the pattern maker at the manufacturer, Putian's Huayuan Hat Factory: Yang Dang'en.

Only 100 hats were made, at 296 yuan each, and they sold out on launch day. A boy at the event thought Zhang Tingting and her team had got the positioning wrong: “You have no experience. You should have put a ‘1' in front of that price — at least 1,296 yuan.”

But selling hats was no more the point than the elaborate exhibition was.

“There's no real difference between Balenciaga making dad shoes and the people in Putian making ‘Yeezy Popcorn' — both are piecing together and copying fragments of information. The Triple S reissues the shoes our dads wore, drapes new colors and a new concept over them, attaches a cool label and a high price, and drives people into a buying frenzy with blanket marketing. It's just that because the brand has decades of history and a voice, piecing together and copying information counts in its favor, while Putian becomes the mocked reflection behind that same frenzy of marketing and consumption. What all this true-and-fake business should finally point to is a question: consumers need to think about what values they actually hold, and what they are really paying for.”

She gave a talk at the exhibition and introduced the pattern maker whose name was on the dad hats. Yang Dang'en, who has been making hats for more than twenty years, stood against the wall in a crisp suit, wearing a baseball cap of his own making, looking a little nervous. He raised his hand, took off the hat and said one sentence: “I'm happy to be here today, and grateful to the designer, Tingting. We went back and forth a lot of times, and in the end we made this product.”

Zhou Bihua, deputy general manager of the manufacturer, Huayuan Hat Factory, spoke next: “The one idea drummed into people about Putian is that it's full of fakes. We put in no less effort than anyone else, but we've only ever done contract manufacturing. I came here hoping to launch Huayuan's own brand — designed by Chinese, made by Chinese — so that everyone from the young to the old can wear something we made ourselves.”

Li Junhua, Huayuan's production manager, was surrounded by young people afterward and kept explaining: “We do contract manufacturing for Nike, Adidas, UA, New Balance. Any sportswear brand you can name, we've made hats for it.”

Yang Dang'en, Zhou Bihua, Li Junhua and Huayuan's own in-house designer, Huangfu Chenlong, were Zhang Tingting's partners and the people who made the dad hats possible. They were also a group of students, curious to see who these young people back from studying abroad could sell such strange hats to.

All four have spent years making hats for other people's labels, and little of that experience helped when they set out to build their own brand, Live Free. Much like the temperament the name suggests, this group badly wants to make something happen, and is still a little clumsy at it.

Zhang Tingting, Founder and Designer of CHS

Zhang Tingting was born in Hubei and grew up in Xiajie, a district of Zhengzhou. In her memory, Xiajie was an artificial town that had grown out of nothing, out of tents, built around the country's largest aluminum industrial base, Henan Aluminum Company. The people around her came from Hubei, Hunan, the Northeast or Shanghai; the dialects ran together, and New Year customs varied from household to household.

So her sense of her own hometown was fragmentary. She carried that fragmentary imprint to London for school, where her already blurry sense of self took another knock. Like many Chinese designers studying abroad, Zhang Tingting tried to find a starting point for her design work inside her own culture, and found she had little to go on.

In her first year studying textiles at Central Saint Martins, she liked to work very overt Japanese and Chinese classical elements — ghosts and spirits, for instance — into her handmade fabrics. Her teachers did not approve. “Your work is too heavy on symbols. As a Westerner, of course I know what I imagine Eastern culture looks like. But what's your own understanding of it?”

After that, Zhang Tingting settled down and began studying knitted fabric one stitch at a time. She found it more interesting to follow the fabric's own physical behavior than to try to iron it flat. She experimented with twisting yarn into small structures that could stand up by themselves, then copying or enlarging those structures so that the fabric did most of the design work.

At the Royal College of Art in London, where she took a master's in millinery, she tried applying this kind of knitted fabric to hats. She chose hats after reading a paper that moved her: it described how a hat carries a person's character, ideas, state of mind and status, and how it becomes a go-between for the mind and the outside world.

Her master's graduation project tried to use hats to express how networked life has become. She collected the sound of a 3D printer at work, the clink of money changing hands, the noise of traffic and songs from the album World Citizen, turned them into audio data, converted that into patterns, and then used a computer-programmed knitting machine — one pixel to one loop — to knit one-of-a-kind fabric.

The graduation collection won her first prize in the accessories category at the Adidas Football design forum, and she was then invited to Adidas's design center in Germany to develop goalkeeper gloves for the teams the brand sponsored at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The gloves South Korea and Germany wore on the pitch were both hers. “Too bad Germany didn't even get out of the group stage,” she said.

While looking through a materials library, Zhang Tingting first came across Huafon, the parent company of Huayuan Hat Factory. Founded in 1991, Huafon's main business is new materials; it has production bases in 11 provinces and municipalities and owns two listed companies, one of which, Huafon Spandex, is China's largest spandex producer.

Zhang Tingting wrote Huafon an email, and as it happened the executive in charge was on a business trip in Germany, so they met in person. When the conversation turned to hats, he mentioned that the company had just set up a hat factory in Putian and wanted a brand of its own. They had picked hats because they worried that making clothes or shoes would upset big customers like Adidas and Nike, so they were starting from a niche category.

“Go take a look sometime, if you get the chance,” he said.

Yang Dang'en, Pattern Maker at Huayuan Hat Factory

The year Zhang Tingting was born, Yang Dang'en had just joined Shenzhen Fida Hat Factory.

Before that he had spent more than a decade as a workshop supervisor at a state-owned factory back home in Zhangzhou, Fujian. In 1993, after market reforms, the factory could not survive, like many state-owned enterprises then; most of the staff were put on unpaid leave and told to find other work. A friend introduced Yang Dang'en to a fellow Zhangzhou native who ran a hat factory in Shenzhen.

“Back then ideals and interests were all fake, you know. Work was hard to find. You were happy if anyone wanted you.” At the state-owned factory Yang Dang'en had earned 100 to 200 yuan a month; talking to his new boss, he inflated it to 300. “He said, I'll pay you triple, come to Shenzhen tomorrow. Shenzhen isn't that far, so I went for the money. I never left the industry after that.”

Yang Dang'en has a streak of pride: “There's no hat I can't make. Five-panel crown, six-panel crown — put the drawing in my hands and I'll cut the pattern.” Old Yang even made the Umbro cap worn by Kris Wu, “who's very hot right now.” He quickly pulled up a few Taobao listings to show off: some selling for over 200 yuan, some for over 2,000.

As Yang Dang'en sees it, a good hat has to be round, and getting a hat round depends on the traditional way of cutting the pattern: a five-panel or six-panel crown. It is like peeling an orange, dividing it into five or six segments from the top.

So when he met Zhang Tingting and this young woman bet him she could break the traditional pattern and still make a round hat, he did not believe her. He had been a pattern maker for more than twenty years. The techniques really had changed — printing, embroidery, patchwork, rhinestones — but the shapes had not changed much: bucket hat, baseball cap, golf cap, they were all five-panel, six-panel or open crowns. He kept stealing glances at the young woman's busy back and tossing out comments like “that won't work,” until he saw the hat take shape and shut his mouth.

“So universities have a hat department after all.” Zhang Tingting remembers that this was probably the first time Yang Dang'en looked up at her and spoke to her first, about a month after they met.

Li Junhua, Production Manager at Huayuan Hat Factory

China's hat world is small — only five or six well-known names — and Li Junhua has worked at all of them. He counts them off on his fingers: Qingdao Qianfeng, Yangzhou Guangda, Shenzhen Fida, Shanghai Yayuan. Shenzhen Fida, where Yang Dang'en also worked, listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2000. For decades these factories have all lived off contract manufacturing; only Yangzhou Guangda runs a brand of its own, Lisi, registered in Singapore.

Li Junhua worked at Guangda too, and got a little worked up telling its story: “Guangda's boss started out as a salesman at a state-owned hat factory. When the factory went under, he and his partners took Lisi over and kept it going, and set up Guangda International — but they never let go of the Lisi name. I helped Guangda build a factory in Vietnam; 70 to 80 percent of the factories there are run by Chinese. But there are a lot of strikes in Vietnam now — people sit blocking a road for three or four hours, the whole street packed with people sitting down. So we had to move to Cambodia instead.”

Li Junhua is from Hubei, born in the 1970s, never went to college, and when he set out to find work in 1992 he was swept up in the wave of migrant labor. That same year, an American company called Paramount Headwear moved its hat production to Shenzhen for the first time, to cut costs — the first foreign hat brand Li Junhua ever came across.

“I remember when I first got to Guangzhou, it was people looking for jobs, not jobs looking for people. As long as a factory would take me, I'd go.” He worked in a plastics factory and a bag-and-luggage factory, and was never very happy. Only after joining Shenzhen Fida in 1996 did his career settle down. That is where he met Old Yang, and he has been in the hat business for more than twenty years since.

Over those twenty-some years, DPM — the hat brand with a lock on licensing for America's four big professional sports leagues (NFL football, MLB baseball, NBA basketball, NHL hockey) — was bought by Fida's boss, resold to a Jewish businessman, then sold again to New Era, a hat brand founded in New York in the 1920s by a German. Li Junhua likes telling people these stories. He is rather proud of them: the dealmaking had nothing to do with him, but no matter how many times the owners changed, the hats still had to pass through his hands, the workshop supervisor's.

He also picked up a habit of counting the people wearing hats on the street when he travels for work — his own kind of market research. Spotting someone in a hat he made, or seeing two people in ten wearing hats, puts him in a good mood.

After leaving Shenzhen Fida, Li Junhua moved on to Yangzhou and Qingdao. He came south to Putian this time partly because he could not take the cold northern weather, and partly because of Zhou Bihua's offer: let's build a brand of our own, Live Free.

Zhou Bihua, Deputy General Manager of Huayuan Hat Factory

Zhou Bihua, who is from Taiwan, has short hair and is a little heavyset, and speaks bluntly and loudly. A jade Guanyin set in silver hangs at her chest, and she likes to touch it as she talks.

She was born in Taoyuan and first came to the mainland in 1988; she has barely been back to Taiwan since. Adidas's first factory in Taiwan was in Taoyuan, and Zhou Bihua's older brother opened his own contract shoemaking factory nearby. While studying business management in college she helped out at her brother's factory and learned to sew on a machine. She also ran a small workshop of her own, sending shoe uppers out to housewives in the neighborhood to stitch at home and collecting them when school let out.

After graduating, Zhou Bihua joined a trading company called Meiqi. Not many people there understood shoes and also had a higher education, so she rose quickly, becoming overseas department manager at 23 when most people at that level were over 50. In 1988 Meiqi opened a branch in Guangzhou, taking an entire floor of the White Swan Hotel for its offices, with the staff dormitories in the hotel too. Zhou Bihua went to Guangzhou with the company, and there she met her husband, a Shanghainese; they went back to Taiwan to marry and have children.

By the time her son was in first grade, Zhou Bihua could not sit still. She read in the paper that Pou Chen, the Taiwanese shoe manufacturer, was hiring at its Zhongshan factory, and having heard Zhongshan was a good place, she applied. This was the early '90s. Pou Chen was among the first wave of Taiwanese-invested factories drawn to the mainland by cheap labor and tax breaks, and it hired in huge numbers. Zhou Bihua remembers young job seekers always piled up outside the factory gate, résumés in hand, waiting for the HR department to pick them over.

She stayed at Pou Chen until it gradually pulled out of the mainland and moved its factories to Southeast Asia. She had just been planning to retire when the generous terms offered by Huayuan's parent, the Huafon Group, drew her to Putian.

The “hat factory we just set up” that the Huafon executive mentioned to Zhang Tingting was Huayuan; and the “brand of its own” was what later became Zhou Bihua's Live Free.

Zhang Tingting, Founder and Designer of CHS

Nearly half a year after that meeting with the Huafon executive, Zhang Tingting finally met the Huayuan people in Putian.

After graduating, she had planned to stay on at Adidas. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, except that her own ideas either went nowhere or came back with another designer's name on them. That is the price of being a cog in a big company: with luck you get noticed, without it your talent is buried. In the end Zhang Tingting decided to ride her enthusiasm home to China and do something of her own, to make the hats she wanted to make. After finishing her master's at the Royal College of Art in 2017, she founded the hat brand Cloud Hat System (CHS) in London.

Looking for a suitable factory, she took the executive's advice and went to Putian.

What she found was an entire ecosystem.

The “A Mao” she met at Anfu Market, discussing the counterfeit trade over tea, and the diligent workers in the factories, gave her a sense of the city's two sides and its complications. On one hand, plenty of people wanted to change, wanted to shed the reputation for fakes; on the other, people were still frantically imitating and piling up big-brand elements. There was a wish to do better, and there was behavior driven purely by profit.

“Everyone in the factories knows a brand is a good thing, but the ‘good' they know is that ‘the real thing costs ten times what we sell it for.' What is a brand, though? Why can it cost so much? How could we have one ourselves? They don't really know.”

While hunting for a factory for her own brand, Zhang Tingting began to form another idea: if CHS's designs, odd as they look at first glance, could win consumers over, then traditional manufacturers might gradually come to understand what it means to protect something new, to protect creation itself.

Zhou Bihua, Deputy General Manager of Huayuan Hat Factory

Zhou Bihua is the person who set the hat factory up for Huafon.

Why a traditional contract manufacturer should turn itself into a brand is not a new question. After this year's import-export tariff changes, some American customers tried to move production out of China, and orders for Huafon's contract business fell. Zhou Bihua also understands perfectly well that for the same 30,000 hats, a brand of your own always makes more money; with contract work, if the order volume is not big enough, all you can guarantee is the workers' wages.

Huafon, 27 years old, is trying to change. It used to do nothing but weave fabric and sell it; over the past two years it brought in German and British engineers to start materials research, developing the fabric best suited to whatever end product a client wanted, and filing for patents and brand marks. Not long ago it registered a fabric called Haptic, coated and printed with Huangbao paste, breathable but with a foaming effect. If Adidas wants to order that fabric from Huafon again, it has to pay a licensing fee and put the Haptic mark on the shoe. When a Japanese client approached Huayuan wanting a batch of hats in eco-friendly yarn, Zhou Bihua ordered the fabric from another mill, Far Eastern Textile, and immediately pushed the parent group to invest in eco-friendly yarn as soon as possible.

Huafon is also willing to spend. A hat factory usually costs a million yuan to set up. In 2016, Zhou Bihua went with the parent group's executives to a knitting machinery show in Shanghai to look at new equipment. The latest hat-knitting machine cost 4 million yuan; Huafon bought Huayuan 40 of them at once.

Still, she cannot understand why a group of people who know nothing about hats or shoes can sell them at sky-high prices, while the people who genuinely know the craft take a tenth of the profit.

The way some domestic brands treat factories annoys her. Even after signing celebrity endorsers and showing at international fashion weeks, local sportswear brands still like to design by following the international brands. Before placing an order they squeeze the factory hard; then, once the factory has been through the preliminary round, the first cut and the second cut and handed over a dozen-odd revised samples, they may change their minds and say the deal is off, take the samples, and go find a cheaper factory to copy them — without paying a cent in sample fees.

Huayuan's decision to build its brand around hats was carefully thought through. Clothes or shoes were too risky: annoying big customers like Nike, Adidas or New Balance and losing their orders could cost the whole factory's 300,000 to 400,000 workers their livelihoods. Hats are less profitable than shoes, but no worse than clothing. Hat and shoe materials are interchangeable, differing only in weight — shoe fabric is thick, 550 grams per square meter, hat fabric only 280 — and shoe trends run at least a season ahead of hat trends, so simply swapping the yarn in a shoe fabric lets hats keep up easily.

But all of that is thinking about the problem as a manufacturer. Understanding consumer demand, sales and marketing channels is the weak point for Zhou Bihua and her colleagues. Shenzhen Fida had already learned this the hard way: for the 2008 Olympics, Fida paid heavily for the rights to Fuwa mascot hats, and lost badly.

Zhou Bihua is a Buddhist and believes in fate. When she brought Li Junhua, Yang Dang'en and Huangfu Chenlong together in 2016 to set up Huayuan Hat Factory and launch Live Free, she felt the timing, the place and the people were all right.

Yang Dang'en happened to be planning to move back home to Zhangzhou around then, and Putian is not far. Zhou Bihua talked him round: “A whole life making hats, and this is where you've got to — do you still feel you got much out of it?”

Huangfu Chenlong, In-House Designer at Huayuan Hat Factory

Of Huafon's many in-house designers, Huangfu Chenlong made the strongest impression on Zhou Bihua. She remembers that this young man drew beautiful sketches, never refused new things and learned fast. Asked to design shoes, he would not brush it off with “I only know hats” — he would ask what the two had in common.

Huangfu is now Live Free's lead designer. He and Li Junhua met while working together at Shenzhen Fida, and Li brought him along when he joined Huayuan.

He and Zhang Tingting are roughly the same generation, but his life and his design career have gone entirely differently.

He was born into a wealthy family in Lanzhou. His parents ran a photography studio, his grandmother was a Chinese-language teacher, his grandfather worked in architectural design, and his uncle is an architect in the United States. Shaped by that, Huangfu began studying art at three and has always liked photography and painting. After going to Jiangxi to study fashion design, he did put some effort into job hunting, but his family quickly arranged things for him: he would be a designer at Shenzhen Fida, since his uncle's assistant happened to be the godson of Fida's boss.

Huangfu is not the rebellious type. He is used to a life arranged for him, sees nothing wrong with that, and does not treat it as an excuse to slack off: “My thinking is, take the chance and study seriously. Everyone has their own specialty. Don't keep thinking about jumping to another job; it takes at least a year or two to get the basics down.” He stayed at Fida for four years.

When Zhou Bihua invited him to help found Live Free, Huangfu did not hesitate long; he moved to Putian with his wife and son. Compared with Fida, he felt Huafon's businesses — fabric, clothing, shoes, hats — offered more to learn.

In Putian, Huangfu's office is like a showroom, piled with hats of every kind: jacquard hats, one-piece hats, different styles developed out of different weaves. Customers who come to Putian often head straight here, pick a style they like, ask for a few small changes, put their own logo on it and wait for shipment.

Next to designers who sit in an office five days a week, Huangfu feels a certain superiority. Even Anta's in-house designers, when they visit, have to hear his opinion on how to revise a drawing to make it “practical.” The advantage of working on site is that when you are not sure whether a design can actually be made, you go downstairs and watch the production line for a few minutes and find out. After seven or eight years alongside Yang Dang'en, Huangfu needs little discussion to turn a drawing into a finished hat with him.

When Zhang Tingting first came to Putian, Huangfu filed her under “office designer” as well. “However beautiful a thing is, it's useless if it can't be made,” he told her, and went on to explain the limits of the craft: “Take sublimation printing. Not every fabric will take a transfer. Some fabrics absorb a lot of dye, some very little, and the result comes out nothing like what you pictured. Some won't take the print without high heat, and high heat ruins the fabric.”

She, in turn, supplied the imagination he lacked. “She has all sorts of wild ideas, a lot of fun concepts.” He also admired how much hardship they would put up with: “For a solid month, three girls stayed in the hat factory until past midnight every day, making things themselves. You don't see many young people like that now.”

Zhang Tingting, Founder and Designer of CHS

In 2018, Zhang Tingting found a small room on Anfu Road in Shanghai and set up her own studio. The CHS logo is a cloud sticking out its tongue, with “Ti” printed on the tongue, short for the pinyin of Ting, from her given name. The cloud comes closest to how Zhang Tingting understands hats: not merely an accessory, but something that can carry feeling, thought, behavior and information.

CHS has launched three product lines since it was founded. One is an artistic pleated series called cHATs LAb, priced above 3,000 yuan, still made by hand in the studio while the brand looks for a supplier. One is an everyday series called toile, priced between 200 and 500 yuan, made with Huayuan Hat Factory out of glossy Nike shoe material, in more ordinary shapes such as baseball caps and bucket hats, but with a heightened sense of design from new ways of piecing the crown panels together. The third is called Tutti, used to try out collaborations on different themes. The dad hats made with Huayuan Hat Factory belong to this line.

Putian gave Zhang Tingting the idea. The argument over “Balenciaga moving dad shoe production from Italy to Putian” caught her interest, and although her first trip there was only meant to sort out production of the everyday line with Huayuan, the street signs recombining hot brand elements hit her hard.

In May, during Shanghai's 2018 Fall/Winter fashion week, Zhou Bihua came to Shanghai to buy textile machinery and stopped by the CHS studio on Anfu Road. Zhang Tingting brought up the idea of a “dad hat,” and the two of them hit it off at once.

Zhou Bihua, Deputy General Manager of Huayuan Hat Factory

Zhou Bihua had long worried about how Live Free would ever get noticed by consumers. The dad hat collaboration with Zhang Tingting counts as the most successful move the brand has made in its two years, even if they still have their doubts about how practical the hats are.

Zhang Tingting, Founder and Designer of CHS

To draw more attention to the dad hat project, Zhang Tingting and Zhou Bihua separately approached the secretary-general of the Putian Footwear Industry Association and the head of the Taiwan Business Association. Neither wanted any association with fake shoes: this is the thorn the city is trying to pull out of its reputation and cannot easily pull out of its economy. The Huafon Group was not especially interested either — what mattered was what to do next, not talking over a somewhat awkward past.

After Vice covered the dad hat exhibition, Taobao's marketing department contacted Zhang Tingting's partner, Wang Hua, hoping CHS would take part in a Taobao variety event, a “C-Spot Product” contest. The studio discussed it and said no: “Whatever that show could offer, the dad hats don't need. Going would only make it easy for people to misread what we're doing. Pricing them at 296 yuan is a way of saying this isn't a project to make money — it's meant to start some discussion and share a few views.”

Zhang Tingting believes her generation of designers has to try to build the habit of talking to an audience in depth, so that people are willing to spend time understanding a question more deeply and with more nuance, rather than settling for the shallow spread of social media.

It was for the same reason that, during Shanghai's Spring/Summer fashion week in October, Zhang Tingting did not sign up for Labelhood, the independent-designer platform many young designers chase — even though one of the judges who had earlier crowned her the winner of Italy's ITS OTB competition, NUMERO editor-in-chief Liang Jiajun, had invited her to join.

She would rather show the Putian project on its own terms. Just as Zhou Bihua and the others are trying to break the labels stuck on Huayuan Hat Factory — Putian fakes, contract factory — she wants to break the labels that the business and design world outside sticks on young designers: “I think there are a lot of really interesting cultural conflicts in China, but designers and artists need to go deep into them, distill them through their own experience into a product or a work an audience can take in and understand, and make people see that Chinese art and fashion have a native language of their own — one that can't be replaced, one that grew here.”

Zhou Bihua, Deputy General Manager of Huayuan Hat Factory

Live Free, of course, still wants to be a mass-market brand.

Last year they tried to promote Live Free through Jackie Chan. Huayuan knew a sales manager on Jackie Chan's Hong Kong team well, and for the past year Huangfu had been designing clothes, shoes and hats for Chan's in-house team. He met Jackie Chan himself, too, and won his approval.

“But too many factories want to sell goods through Jackie Chan. Anyone designing a phone case or a pair of glasses wants his brand on it. His warehouse is stuffed with the stuff. What the Hong Kong sales manager meant was, you have to give me several million yuan before I'll license the brand to you.” They paid part of the money and got the hats listed for a while on Jackie Chan's personal brand website, but the site itself closed before long for lack of management.

Another idea was to find a Putian e-commerce operator to open up sales and marketing channels on Taobao and Weibo — much the business model built by Ruhnn Holding, the company behind the internet celebrity Zhang Dayi. The Putian operator Zhou Bihua contacted mainly handled handbags and clothing, had never done hats, and asked her to give him a story for Live Free.

“Old Yang” — Yang Dang'en — was the first story they came up with. “He's a veteran craftsman. Fits nicely with all this talk about craftsman spirit these days. Easy to move people with.”

But Zhou Bihua refused to shave the line on the brand logo the way the partner suggested. She showed me the logo designs he had sent to her phone: one added “NY” (short for New York) above Supreme's box logo, another turned Louis Vuitton into the Chinese name “Louis Wang.” All of them could be registered successfully with the trademark office. This Putian operator also claimed he could sell the goods on Taobao at the same prices as genuine Supreme or LV, and promote them on Toutiao — “sell the fake as the real thing.”

It was a shortcut: “Whoever's hot right now, you ride their heat, and there will always be customers willing to pay.” But all four people at Huayuan Hat Factory flatly rejected it: “If we actually did that, there'd be no difference between us and those ‘Yeezy Trefoil' outfits in Putian. We'd never get out from under the shadow of the contract factory.”

Zhou Bihua also recently had her son, who is studying in the United States, set up a Live Free storefront on Amazon. It currently says “Coming Soon.”

Li Junhua, Production Manager at Huayuan Hat Factory

Li Junhua makes a point of wearing every hat that passes through his hands. Every one except the dad hats.

He believes in the 80/20 rule, and reckons the dad hats' audience is only that 20 percent.

But he has no doubts about his line of work. He has noticed that ever since a few stars wore New Era caps on the variety show Running Man China and The Rap of China made hip-hop styling popular, more people on the street have started wearing hats. And when New Era met with Zhou Bihua, they told her that hats alone were already a $36 billion market in the United States.

Interviewed at the Wagas beside Laoximen metro station in Shanghai, Li Junhua kept breaking off to point out hat wearers passing the window. The age of the hat, he feels, has finally arrived.

Yang Dang'en, Pattern Maker at Huayuan Hat Factory

Yang Dang'en remembers that after the unveiling that day, he and Tingting sat in a small room piled with colored cotton and balloons, talking to everyone who had bought a dad hat and asking why. Almost nobody planned to wear it day to day; some said “I think it's a decent piece of art,” others said “Old Yang moved me.”

Li Junhua and Huangfu Chenlong both wore hats that day. Huangfu had on a brown four-pocket vest with bright red trousers. The round-crowned, narrow-brimmed felt hat on his head was one he had made by hand, with a rubber lizard crouched on the brim.

Li Junhua's hat was a Live Free — one of the few Live Free products that has so far made it out onto the street. Large quantities are still sitting in the factory warehouse, waiting for the right sales channel.

Cover image and article photographs courtesy of Cloud Hat System.