Fab 5 Freddy, Still Fly

"FlameKeepers Hat Club sits on a quiet corner in Harlem where St. Nicholas Avenue, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and West 121st Street converge. The shop's towering shelves are piled with fedoras, porkpies, boaters, and flat caps in the usual colors-browns, blacks, blues-as well as the hues of cantaloupe flesh, crème de violette, and raspberry sherbet."

""A buddy of mine did this brand and he calls it Heads 4 Dreads," he said. "Because guys that wear dreadlocks, most hats don't fit them. So he made the hats extra large.""

"The two met thirty-odd years ago, when Williamson was a salesman at the venerable JJ Hat Center, in midtown. Brathwaite was looking for a straw panama hat. At the time, he was the host of "Yo! MTV Raps," the program that cemented hip-hop's transition from an underground movement to a global juggernaut. Hats, along with his ever-present shades, were key to the Fab 5 Freddy look-on TV, he interviewed a brash young Tupac Shakur while wearing a rabbinical black fedora and a droll Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, in a backward newsboy cap."

FlameKeepers Hat Club sits on a quiet Harlem corner where St. Nicholas Avenue, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and West 121st Street converge. Towering shelves hold fedoras, porkpies, boaters, and flat caps in traditional browns, blacks, and blues as well as vivid hues like cantaloupe flesh, crème de violette, and raspberry sherbet. Fred Brathwaite, known as Fab 5 Freddy, visited in a fleece-lined leather coat, gray scarf, and a black baseball cap. He and proprietor Marc Williamson trace a friendship to roughly thirty years earlier when Williamson worked at JJ Hat Center and Brathwaite hosted Yo! MTV Raps. Hats have been central to Brathwaite's public image across his varied career in hip-hop and street art.

Read at The New Yorker