Hats off to Optimo; icon opens in city

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Updated: February 21, 2012 8:40AM

In the Steve Jobs biography, colleagues of the Apple founder refer to his “reality distortion field” — the ability of his charisma to make all who came under its sway believe they could do extraordinary things.

A great store is like that. You’re going about your business, with no intention of buying anything. Suddenly you are drawn into this wonderworld, pulled by its gravity, spellbound, disoriented. Your values do a shift and you reach for your wallet.

Business brought me to the Monadnock Building last week, to 53 W. Jackson, where I saw that Optimo Hat Shop has finally opened a new location there — two weeks ago Friday, in fact.

Of course I knew about Optimo — almost 20 years ago, Graham Thompson, a young Chicagoan who had fallen in love with the romance and beauty of hats, apprenticed himself to one of the last South Side hatmakers, Johnny Tyus, and opened a shop in Beverly, where Hollywood stars and bluesmen and guys who just wanted a really, really good beaver fur hat made their way.

For years, I stiff-armed the temptation to follow them on a pilgrimage to Optimo because of two facts: a) I am not a Hollywood star or a bluesman and b) Optimo’s fine, hand-made-in-Chicago-for-you hats cost $600 apiece. Or more.

But the shop was right there, and it is one beautiful haberdashery. Black-stained oak floor. A partition of metal cables, holding the various models of hat, as if floating in air, with the vintage wooden blocks used to make them, still, arrayed behind. Gorgeous, like a hat museum, like a Magritte dream.

I wandered in. A saleswoman glided over. Soon I was modeling a deep green Robusto fedora. It looked good, even on me. Perhaps, I speculated, the brim was a tad too wide. “Daley’s brims were always too wide,” I murmured. We nodded our heads gravely over the former mayor’s sartorial ineptitude. A hat with a narrower brim was conjured, a rich chocolate brown.

I looked inside the hat. A fine creme silk lining, with “Optimo” embossed in gold.

I happened to be wearing an Eddie Bauer Ridgeline parka — it was cold, I knew I’d be hiking across town to lunch, so warmth had seemed important. But now, here, in the spare elegance of Optimo, it was an embarrassment that had to be explained.

“I usually wear a Burberry raincoat,” I mumbled, wanly, several times, not daring add that it was a Burberry raincoat bought cut-rate for $175 at a discount outlet store in Michigan City.

In life, it is important to maintain a certain consistency. Even if I could afford a Rolls-Royce, it would look out of place in my asphalt-turning-to-gravel driveway, it would look wrong over the half-dying hedge and piebald, crabgrass-clotted lawn, almost nightmarish, framed against the sagging, aluminum-sided farmhouse with its crazily-tilting spire. It wouldn’t decorate the general shabbiness of my life, it would accentuate it, like putting bows on a dung heap.

Yes, a man can get away with the occasional flourish — the raincoat is just upscale enough to add a little luster, I hope, without making people suspect I stole it from the cloakroom at the Union League Club. But the Optimo hat would be off the scale — I wouldn’t own it, it would own me. Or so I thought. “If only I were rich,” I sighed. Nina Thompson, Graham’s wife, argued, stressing the practicality of the hats, the regular folk who buy them and love them. Perhaps . . .

It isn’t that I don’t have $600 to spend — I spent more than that this week on cat surgery. But saving the life of a beloved pet comes under the “Unavoidable Financial Burdens” exception, along with car repair and braces for the boys’ teeth. For what I’ve spent on braces, I could buy 20 Optimo hats, but buying just one would be an insane personal extravagance. “Sorry kid, you can’t go to college. Daddy wanted a hat.” My wife would murder me, and the joy of ownership would be blotted out by the trauma of purchase.

Of course not everybody in Chicago is an anxious newspaperman, and if you are the sort who can buy a $600 hat, calmly, without swan-diving into a hellmouth of regret, congratulations. I urge you to make your way to the Monadnock Building and only wish I could join you. Maybe someday. Optimo is one of those places that add magic to a city — a dream made real, a sacred shrine to the hatter’s art. I want them to be there, ready, just in case my ship ever comes in. It won’t, but hope is free, or as Robert Browning once wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”