“Red is everybody’s favorite color; they just don’t know it,” says hat designer James Keith—not to be confused with his hat label, Keith James. “Red is a sign of power. It’s a statement color, and I feel like it’s a perfect way to really showcase your personality from a hat perspective.”
While crafting his New Year’s Eve outfit in 2016, something struck him—a plain black hat just wouldn’t do. “I thought, Red is my favorite color, how cool would it be to have a two-tone hat? I had never seen one before I started doing it. I searched the internet for a little bit, but I couldn’t find one, so obviously I didn’t have a hat for that night,” he says. The next day he decided to take matters into his own hands, eventually creating a sample and using his rolodex to put his hats on the right heads. Soon, the Keith James brand was born.
For Keith, hats prove powerful not only for what they symbolize, but for what they say about the wearer. “People that have big personalities want to wear a big hat. And then you have people that like to fly under the radar, they want a smaller brim. So you kind of know what type of person they are based on their hat,” he says. Personally, Keith prefers a tailored approach. “For me, the perfect hat is all about the style and the feel because certain hats require certain attention to details based on where you’re going to put the hat, what element you’re going to have the hat in,” he says. But what’s most interesting to him is the burst of color. “I have an all-red hat, but it doesn’t give you the pop that you need,” he says of the reasoning behind his signature scarlet underbrim. “Contrast is key.”
Keith’s hats are made for the man who is “very, very interested in fashion.” “You always have that one friend, right? They come around and they always have something new on. That’s the person I design for…so they can tell the story.… It’s a great conversation piece,” he says.
The hatter is on a mission to make the art of dressing up more mainstream. Growing up in North Carolina, he was greatly influenced by seeing his father and grandfather don their Sunday best, always with a hat in tow. Keith sees headwear as a way into a more formal everyday dress code, an idea in step with the concept of Black dandyism, which was recently ushered into the spotlight at the 2025 Met Gala.
“Back in the day, guys used to have a nice top hat on with a nice suit and a nice pair of shoes and we kind of went away from that over the last 5 to 10 years,” he says, “so bringing it back [during the Met Gala] was phenomenal.” Now Keith is keen on completing the Keith James aesthetic by delving deeper into the accessories market with a forthcoming introduction of men’s and women’s shoes. He will, of course, be including that signature pop of red.
Below Keith shares his favorite things.
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