The 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, Ms. 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 Ms. Feurstein had with her; and within 48 hours an order was placed.

“They’ve been ordering ever since,” Ms. Feurstein, 39, said while seated on a stool in the back of her shop in the 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 Ms. 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 hatmaking.”

After Ms. 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.

Ms. Feurstein absorbed traditional hatmaking 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, like the fedora style called Heather and the clochelike Lou, have other crossover qualities.

One celebrity fan is 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.”


By GISELA WILLIAMS