If you walked down E 10th St in a hurry, your eyes might slide from charming apartment building to charming apartment building and completely miss The Millinery Shop. After all, Noah and I nearly did, even though at that point we were desperate for warmth and an interview. The Millinery Shop is a narrow little store with white walls, plenty of sunlight, and lots and lots of hats. Hats rested upon rustic wooden shelves, they adorned the faceless busts in the window. Fascinators and fedoras, bowler hats and boat caps hung on hooks in the wall and stared at themselves in the numerous framed mirrors lining the walls. Some of the headwear looked like they came straight from the Roaring Twenties or a British Royal event while others would be perfectly at home on the head of a trendy fashion blogger in 2017.
The only occupant of the store when we burst in from the street on that particular unseasonably cold afternoon was a woman intently sewing brown feathers onto a headband. This was Lin Paik, the sole owner and proprietor of the Millinery Shop. She’s a small, reserved person who seemed rather confused as to why two college students would want to interview her, of all people. She continued working on the headpiece while talking, her fingers deftly attaching the feathers to the band. A corporate interior designer by trade, Lin picked up millinery after taking a night class at the Fashion Institute of Technology and opened her shop not long after that. She praised F.I.T.’s millinery program, saying that “a lot of actual New York milliners trained at FIT”, although she did qualify that by adding that there are some skills that you can only learn in practice. That’s why she has unpaid interns who help her in the store and in turn get to learn the art of millinery from someone more experienced.
Running a shop devoted to a “lost art form”, as Lin put it, puts her in an interesting position. She welcomes foot traffic and visitors to the store but recognizes that not everyone can afford bespoke headwear. College students come into her shop to try on the unique headwear and are very supportive and enthusiastic of the trade, but often do not have the means to actually purchase any hats. Curious, I picked up the fedora in front of me and glanced at the price tag that read $285. A little out of my price range. Scratch that—a lot out of my price range. Lin told us that she hopes that she can build a reputation for her shop so she can compete with some of the milliners that have been in business for far longer than her. She added that older businesses have less difficulty maintaining a clientele even in such a specific, rare field. Although running a large company with numerous employees does not appeal to her, she wants stability and recognizes that “to affect true stability, you need scale”.
Lin partially credits her landlord with helping her business thrive, saying that both the landlord and the co-op board have been immensely useful. After all, a good landlord is hard to find. Running a small business in the city can be a challenge under the best of circumstances, with heavy taxes and regulations, but she said that there are resources available if you know where to look. Lin praised the Small Business Corporation with helping her deal with some of the trash regulations that the city government has for small businesses but added that she’s no expert on the minutiae of running a business and didn’t want to talk badly about the city government without knowing the full story.
New York City is the place to be for artisans practicing unique art forms, and Lin recognizes the effect that the city at large has on her creativity and success. She credits the denizens of New York and their fashion sensibilities with some of her headwear inspirations and also recognizes the role that the ambiance of the rest of the neighborhood has on her own growth. The East Village creates places for artists and craftspeople, and Lin Paik is both. Her hands keep pulling needle and thread through russet feathers as we thank her for her time and she doesn’t look up, but instead continues to sew.
