“I rolled the dice,” recalls Mejia, who apprenticed with the master hatter before buying the shop outright in 1995.
Baron refused to sell him any hat-making equipment unless he purchased the entire store. In 1993, Mejia approached Eddie Baron, who founded Baron Hats in 1970, about purchasing some of the shop’s aluminum hat molds. “I was looking for my passion,” recalls Mejia, who studied the hat-making craft during several trips to New York City in the early 1990s, and began making hats as a sideline while working for the Los Angeles school district. Ready for a change, he decided to try his hand as a hatter, following the suggestion of a hat-maker friend. He also re-created Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat for permanent display in the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.Ī native of Downey, California, Mejia took a roundabout route to hat-making, spending 12 years as a science technician for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Mejia’s original creations include Johnny Depp’s straw boater in “Public Enemies ” Ryan Gosling’s 1940s fedora in “Gangster Squad ” and dozens of Western hats for the entire Cavendish Gang in last summer’s “The Lone Ranger” movie. During the last 20 years, Mejia has created thousands of hats-from British bowlers and felt fedoras to pretty pillboxes and straw boaters-for Hollywood actors and entertainers.
The owner of Baron Hats in Burbank, California, Mejia is a perfectionist when it comes to crafting custom headwear. “It wasn’t giving me the result I wanted.” “It was too stiff,” says Mejia, 49, dunking and twisting the hat-in-progress to soften the stubborn beaver felt. Mark Mejia dumps a handful of Borax into a large enamel pot of simmering water and submerges a Western-style hat that he’s making for singer John Mayer to wear in his latest music video.
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