German hat designer Rike Feurstein has the sort of discovery story that most fledgling designers can only dream about. One winter day in 2007, almost a year after opening a little atelier in Berlin, Feurstein was in Manhattan and spontaneously popped into Barneys New York. She was wearing her classic Faye hat, a jaunty outsize caboose-style cap crocheted from almost rope-size wool yarn. The hat caught the eye of a floor manager, who enthusiastically flipped through the look book Feurstein had with her; within 48 hours an order was placed. 'They've been ordering ever since,' Feurstein, 39, said while seated on a stool in the back of her shop in Berlin's Mitte neighborhood. Slender and blond, she was wearing a fitted purple dress by the Finnish designer Ivana Helsinki. Wooden hat forms, jars of feathers and boxes of colorful fabric surrounded her. The store buys 'a lot of the wool hats,' she said, referring to her collection of colorful, large knit hats like the Faye, which is crocheted by hand. The stitch technique is patented. 'I've registered quite a few of my styles,' said Feurstein, who until 2004 was a lawyer and investment manager for a venture capitalist. 'It's good to be a lawyer in the world of hat-making.' After Feurstein quit the law, she apprenticed with two well-known milliners: Rose Cory in London, who made hats for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and Suzanne Couture Millinery in New York. Feurstein absorbed traditional hat-making techniques but soon started tweaking classic designs, rendering them more structured and minimalist. She plans the design of a new hat like a sculptor, first building a shape from clay or plaster, which is then copied in wood. The wooden form is then used as a mold to shape a hat of fur felt or straw. Despite the artisanal quality of her hats, even the wool knit pieces look sleek and contemporary. 'It's fascinating because I think of her hats as modern and edgy, yet she uses such soft and homey materials and techniques,' said Gretta Van Leuven, a women's accessories buyer for Barneys. 'Her pieces have a modern aesthetic; they are not homemade or 'Grandma' looking.' The hats have other crossover qualities. Feurstein's fur felt hats, like the fedora style called Heather and the cloche-like Lou, appeal to both uptown and downtown personalities. In November 2008, Janet Jackson was photographed wearing the Heather at the black-tie bash for the opening of the Atlantis hotel in Dubai. In the issue of Vogue that came out the same month, Reese Witherspoon looked timeless in a black Lou. More recently, Heidi Klum's stylist ordered a dozen hats for an episode of 'Germany's Next Top Model.' Another celebrity fan is one of fashion's trendsetters, Rihanna. The singer's stylist, Mariel Haenn, said: 'The hats are pretty but can be tough at the same time. You can wear them with a gown or just a T-shirt and jeans.' Rihanna first tried on one of Feurstein's hats at an album shoot in Berlin last year. 'There wasn't one hat she didn't like,' Haenn recalled. 'It was like a light bulb went off as soon as she put one on. She transformed to something else with each style.' Rihanna ended up buying a leopard-print Heather. Haenn raved about one of Feurstein's newer styles, the Solange, a turban-shaped hat made of what looks like wicker, or as Haenn described it, 'like straw fishnet.' The same hat caught the eyes of the owners of Opening Ceremony, an avant-garde shop with two locations in Manhattan and outposts in Los Angeles and Tokyo. 'What we look for at Opening Ceremony is a mix of classic shapes and unexpected use of material,' said an owner, Carol Lim. 'We immediately gravitated to that piece.' The store bought the Solange in three colors (white, natural and black) and several visor-style headpieces (the Lilith) in the same material. Within two months more than a dozen, at $350 or so each, had been sold. 'We don't talk about our celebrity clients,' Lim said. 'But I can tell you that you'll be seeing those hats on some pretty interesting style-makers this summer.' 