Janicza Bravo’s Hats
This roundup of things we liked this week originally appeared in the May 22, 2025 edition of the Secret Strategist newsletter, a weekly email where we share the stuff our staff — plus a rotating cast of writers, design-world people, and various others with very good taste — would otherwise keep to themselves. If you want to get our picks straight to your inbox each week, sign up here.
We’re having discourse on socks with sandals, which really comes down to the socks. A DIY tip: Get a pair of sharp scissors and cut Uniqlo men’s socks to wherever “short crew” falls on you. —Simone Kitchens, Lauren Ro, and Erin Schwartz
This Week’s List
* New York features writer Madeline Leung Coleman has many talents; one of them is an expert eye for socks. “Socks with sandals is my late-spring lifestyle. I pretty much only wear fisherman sandals in the summer, which is the obvious best style for New York — sturdy, easy to walk or bike in, and ventilated without exposing your tender paws to street filth,” she says. She has these from Hereu and also recommends these from Etsy — “handmade in Kyiv, great leather, lots of colors.”
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* For the socks: “Solid colors and crew-height or above only,” says Madeline. Uniqlo men’s are a classic, as are Muji “right angle” socks. “A more refined option would be Colorful Standard’s classic organic sock. But my all-around favorite sockery is Tabio from Japan. The cotton-crew or short-crew socks are $25 well spent.”
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* Separately, but similarly, Simone has been looking around for some nice-looking fisherman sandals for her husband. The runaway winner: these Paraboots. But these Campers, these Fracaps from Toast, and this beautiful pair from Hereu were all contenders. Honorable mention goes to these “Jerusalem Sandals.” She plans to throw in an extra pack of these.
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* A rainbow of perfect plastic stools originally designed for a park in London.
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* Some more links from Madeline: upholstered Danish chairs from this shop called Soutine and a pretty summer wedding-guest dress from Dosa found on the Real Real.
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* Lauren stopped into Rendez-Vous when she was in Paris last week and picked up this dress from Ylève, a new-to-her Japanese brand. She also tried on this Cawley skirt and this V-neck Sofie d’Hoore dress. Her sister had her eye on these sabots from Marsèll, but they were out of her size. And for her husband’s birthday at the end of the month, she got him a light jacket in almond (sold out) from Casey Casey. For the kids, two Breton shirts from Petit Bateau, one with green stripes and another with white stripes on blue. Strategist junior writer Bella Druckman, also just back from Paris, got this leather-trimmed straw tote from Kate Lee and an enamel strainer from La Trésorerie.
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Director Janicza Bravo has been wearing hats for most of her life. She told us about the baseball caps she wears every day, the hats she wore all week while in New York for the Met Gala, and her philosophy on hat gifting.
“Right now I’m mostly wearing baseball caps. Today I’m wearing this Home Depot NASCAR collab hat. I know exactly the date that I bought it. It was the day after the election last year; I was in Louisiana visiting the set of this film I’m producing. Remember how when Hillary lost, the air was thick with grief? I think I was expecting that this time, and I found it sort of chilling how it was so nonchalant, as if nothing had happened. So I get to Louisiana, and I was like, I gotta drag up. I need some conservative drag. I went into a secondhand store and found this. It’s Home Depot. It’s NASCAR. I looked up the name of the guy that was on it just to make sure he wasn’t a racist or a wife beater. What was amazing is that for 72 hours in Louisiana, so many people complimented me. I looked like me, but then maybe it was discombobulating because the hat was communicating, you know, “God bless the USA.” Now I wear it a ton in L.A., and I’ve worn it in New York, and people think it’s Balenciaga. There’s a Demna, sort of ’90s thing about it, but it’s just really that, though; it’s not the wink that, it’s the real that. Ezra Woods saw it and really liked it. I found a NASCAR Lowe’s collab one for him. He came up with the genius idea that Lowe’s and Loewe should collab.
People always like my baseball caps. I have a small collection of hats to give away. I got Jeremy O. Harris this quite awesome trucker hat. He’s from Virginia, and it was from when the Special Olympics were held in Virginia.
My pal Maryam Keyhani, a really, really, really special designer, makes these whimsical and playful and joyous hats. Many years ago, before we met, I was working on this show in Toronto called Mrs. America, and I happened to be at this grocery store and I saw her with her daughter. I was just like, What’s that on her head? I think her kid had a kooky hat on too. Years later she writes me on Instagram, and we became buddies. I wrote her right before going to New York for the Met; I wanted to wear a series of silly, big, goofy hats for a series of days, and I ended up wearing different hats of hers for a week.
I have these other hats by this guy who goes by the name of Director Fits on Instagram. He’s made some merch related to movies. One that I really dig wearing is this Robert De Niro camo hat from The Deer Hunter. I wear that hat a lot when I’m at border patrol. There is not a straight man with a gun who is not obsessed with Robert De Niro, literally — the amount of men that it disarms. He made another one for the movie Decision to Leave, commemorating its Cannes Film Festival award. People who don’t know film will congratulate me on my Best Director award from the Festival de Cannes, and I’ll be like, “It says Park Chan-wook; this is another director.” But sometimes I just accept it and say, “Thank you so much.” It’s easier than explaining.
I remember wearing hats to church as a kid. My stepfather was Catholic. Imagine any Black woman in Harlem, a Black woman in the South, whatever you’ve decided that hat is, but like the child version of it. I had an assortment of little straw hats with elastic that goes under the chin. I think it’s become, for me, an extension of how people use their hair. I shaved my head 20 years ago. So a hat is my hair. It’s my bangs, it’s my bob, it’s my blonde … I either wanna hide a little or I want an exclamation point. Also, we don’t want melanoma. So we protect the skull.”
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