Meet The Ukrainian Designer Behind Bella Hadid’s Favorite Baker Boy Cap
At some point, Instagram replaced US Weekly as the easiest way to see what celebrities are wearing in real-time. Supermodel vacation pics, airport looks, the red carpet—it's all just a scroll away, which has become a huge advantage for brands (especially when Insta stars are kind enough to tag them). With just one post, our favorite public figures can give a previously unknown fashion label a chance to make it big. This is exactly what happened with the Ukraine’s hottest young hat designer, Ruslan Baginskiy from a picturesque city called Lviv.
His break came after Bella Hadid asked to keep one of his eponymous baker boy caps following a photoshoot for Elle Russia’s September 2017 issue. Soon after, the model tagged his brand on her social media account and requests from other mega-watt stars like Kourtney Kardashian, Sofia Richie, and Elsa Hosk came rolling in with breakneck speed. They all placed their orders the same way: through Instagram.
“Everything I have, I owe to Instagram,” says Baginskiy from his studio, which has since moved to Ukraine’s capital city Kiev to help maximize access to the country’s native and visiting fashion elite. “Instagram is the most powerful tool in our industry right now. The world is so big, but on Instagram we’re all together. Every job, every order, every connection I’ve made has been through it. Instagram has given me, this unknown person from a super small town, the chance to really do something.”
Baginskiy’s obsession with hats started with a felt fedora. His grandfather wore one while he was growing up and as a child he remembers admiring its elegance and the ease with which it pulled together any outfit. “In Lviv there is a strong tradition with hats,” the designer explains. “Nowhere else in the Ukraine has it, but in my hometown everyone wears hats. Often they are strange and outlandish shapes, but my grandfather always wore a simple, wide-brimmed fedora. It was the first hat in my life and it remains my favorite style to this day.”
But access to fashion doesn’t come easily to someone growing up in a country like Ukraine. In 1991, the former Soviet state gained independence from Russia in a bloody war that still churns on in the country’s eastern border towns to this day. With magazines hard to come by in Lviv, the Internet was Baginskiy’s meal ticket during his teens. “I was obsessed with fashion and would spend hours watching and learning from [the now defunct] style.com," he recalls. “I was a superfan of Alexander McQueen, Phillip Treacy, and Stephen Jones—their hats were pure fantasy to me.” When some of the designer’s childhood friends became models in the early to mid 2000s, they would bring him back issues of luxury fashion editions from Paris.
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