Hip hat gig a feather in her cap
Toronto milliner Karyn Ruiz crafted headwear the Tragically Hip frontman has sported on his two recent tours
After making six hats for Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie to wear during the band’s cross-country Man Machine Poem tour, Toronto milliner Karyn Ruiz offered to make him two more.
Ruiz runs Lilliput Hats, a boutique and workshop in Toronto’s Little Italy, which has made and sold custom hats for nearly three decades.
She was first recruited to make Downie’s hats months ago by Toronto designer Izzy Camilleri, who did his suits for the Hip’s summer tour.
Since word got out that Ruiz was behind Downie’s hats, she has been showered with messages and gets Hip fans coming by her shop sharing band stories.
From some, she now gets requests for custom Downie-style hats, which, she says, are one-of-a-kind.
Ruiz has tried to pay forward some of the gratitude, having just sent a young boy a snippet from Downie’s turquoise tour suit and a few feathers from his hat to add to a Halloween tribute outfit.
Ruiz met Downie in person for the first time last week; he popped by her shop, while in the neighbourhood, to try on his new Secret Path hats and say hello.
Even before that, Ruiz says she felt like she’s known Downie for a long time through his music, and, more recently, through their collaborative Man Machine Poem Toronto milliner Karyn Ruiz reveals the process of creating Gord Downie’s hats hat-making process.
“He is a very powerful man, just an authentic and beautiful man. You know, when he hugs you, he hugs you,” Ruiz said. “. . . he holds a tremendous amount of a special quality about him.”
The two new hats, made for Downie to wear during his recent solo Secret Path tour in Ontario, were more subtle than the ones Canada got used to seeing on stage and on jumbo screens this summer.
As she did for those, Ruiz made the new hats to match the mood of the show, the music and Downie’s presence on stage. This time around, she realized all those things were going to be different.
“I think he didn’t want to take up a lot of room on the stage (when singing Secret Path) . . . because the music is really in his head and thoughtful and heavy, really powerful,” Ruiz said. “There were lots of times he was really bowed down.”
Downie, who announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer earlier this year, sometimes reads from a teleprompter on stage.
Through his newest solo project, he tells the story of Chanie Wenjack, a boy who died fleeing a residential school 50 years ago.
“The focus (of the Secret Path shows) was on the material, so everything had to be very low-key,” Ruiz said, noting that Downie wore all denim on stage, not the shiny suits he sported this summer.
On one of the new hats she made for Downie, Ruiz tucked in a few feathers she said were given to her by Ryan Kaminawash, a friend to the Wenjack family and Downie fan.
While she maintains that she won’t ever copy the hats she made for the two recent tours, Ruiz has donated two Downie-inspired hats to an online fundraising auction.
Those two, she said, are as close as anyone is going to get to the real thing.
Bidding for one hat has ended — it sold for $1,200 — but a purple one, made from rabbit fur felt and lined with lyrics from “Bobcaygeon,” is up for grabs until Friday at 9 p.m.
Janis Zvigulas, a neuroscience nurse from Carlton Place, Ont., bought the first hat.
He said he sees it as a piece of Canadiana, not something he has any plans to wear.
“Gord (Downie) and the Hip have, basically, been the soundtrack to me growing up; they’ve always kind of been there through high school and college,” he said.
“All my friends are big fans. It’s just been part of my life.”
Though he’d like to hang on to it, Zvigulas has a “pipe dream” of getting the hat signed by Downie.
That way, he thinks he can raffle it off to make even more money to donate.
“I’m a neuro nurse. I see these people every day, and the suffering and agony that goes with these types of disease, and it is horrible. It is nice to be able to put the money back into something I’m involved in,” Zvigulas said.
Rob Ferreira, president of the website “Courage for Gord,” where the hat auction is hosted, said all proceeds raised will be divvied up between the Gord Downie Fund for Brain Cancer Research at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Downie’s Secret Path Fund at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Manitoba and the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack fund at the Toronto Foundation.
“There is a lot of goodwill and beautiful things that happen because of the way I think (Downie) has united the fans, and united the country . . . It’s been a really amazing experience to work with him,” Ruiz said.