A hand painted baseball cap from us costs $95, and the plain version of what that buys is this: the same Dirty Martini cap we sell for $65, in Indian Creek Red, with an artist named Muji drawing on the crown by hand in paint pen after your order comes in. Thirty exist and no more. As I write this, 29 are still available. Everything else we make is $65 across the board, so this is the only piece in the shop priced above the rest, and I think the reason for that should be legible before anyone spends the money.
Two questions follow this cap around. Is a luxury baseball cap actually worth the extra money, and does a hand painted one of one piece really have a place in streetwear. I will answer both, in that order, because the second one is the reason this cap exists at all.
What the extra $30 actually buys
Start with what does not change. The base is the Dirty Martini Baseball Cap in Indian Creek Red, $65, soft full-panel cotton with a structured crown and a curved brim. On the front is the sublimated Dirty Martini patch with a 2D embroidered satin-stitch contour, stitched on: "Dirty" in red serif across the top, two martini glasses with olives on picks, red roses underneath, all of it sitting on a near-black background inside a burgundy border. Down the wearer's right side there is raised rubber lettering reading Don't Take It Personally. One size, adjustable snapback, fitting about 58 cm on this cap. If you already own a Dirty Martini, you know exactly what is under the art.
The $30 is the drawing. Muji covers that red crown in his own artwork, loose organic characters that curl around the patch and across the crown, and he does every hat himself, one at a time. Nothing about the blank changes, and if a brand tells you a price jump came from better cotton I would want to see that proven. So the question is narrow: is somebody's hand on your cap worth thirty dollars to you. For plenty of people the honest answer is no, and the $65 version is right there.
We don't do custom. This is the one time we do.
Everything else in the baseball cap collection comes out of a drop that already exists, and we do not take requests for personalized patches. That rule has not moved. What moved once, for this, is the part where somebody outside our own team gets to put a mark on a finished cap.
The exception has limits built into it. Thirty caps, one artist, and no requests taken on what he draws, so you are buying a spot in a run of thirty and letting Muji decide what shows up on yours.
What Muji actually draws
Muji is an artist in New York. He describes his own work better than I could, so here it is in his words, lowercase as he wrote it:
biomorphic organic pieces that all fit together in one universe. a lot of it is about the curvature of nature and the fact that there are no straight lines in nature. everything completes something else. each character is him on a different day. one day you feel like you have four arms, some days you feel like you have no eyes.
That is worth reading twice if you are trying to picture what lands on your cap. No straight lines, characters that fit into each other, one hand producing something different depending on the day. The line about each character being him on a different day is also, in a plain sense, how these get made, because every cap in the thirty is drawn on its own day.
What "made to order" means when you're the one waiting
Made to order gets used loosely, so here is the literal version for this cap. There is no finished one in a box waiting on your click. Your order is what starts the drawing, on an Indian Creek Red cap that nobody has touched yet.
I am not going to print a ship date in a blog post. One person is drawing these by hand, and I would rather tell you nothing than hand you a number I cannot hold. What I can tell you is the trade you are agreeing to: a real wait, longer than a cap we already have sitting on the shelf, in exchange for a hat nobody else owns a copy of.
One more thing follows from that. You're not buying a copy of the one in the photo. The photos on the product page show caps that have already been drawn, and yours will be recognizably his work and different from every one of them. If variation from a product photo bothers you, this is not the cap to buy.
Why thirty, and not an open run
Thirty is a number one person can genuinely draw himself. That is the only reason for it. Open the run up and the drawing becomes production work for whoever is holding the pen, done fast enough to keep up with demand, and the thing you paid extra for quietly stops being true while the price stays the same.
An edition also makes the count checkable. Thirty is on the page, 29 are left today, and you can watch that number move without taking my word for anything. I would rather publish a real number that shrinks in public than write the word limited and leave you guessing what it covers.
Does a hand painted one of one belong in streetwear?
I came across a painter asking a version of this in a forum thread recently: do custom one of one hand painted pieces have a place in streetwear. My answer is yes, with one condition, and the condition has nothing to do with the painting. The base has to be something a person would have bought anyway.
Paint on a cheap blank and the paint is carrying almost all of the price, which a buyer feels the second the box opens. The reason this collaboration holds up is that the Dirty Martini already sells at $65 on its own, with its own patch and its own side lettering, to people who never asked for artwork on top of it. Muji is drawing on a cap that was already finished and already selling. Art used to rescue a garment nobody wanted is a much harder sell.
So if you paint and you are trying to sell, that is the part I would solve first. The art cannot be the only thing in the package that is worth money.
Where to go from here
If you want the version with Muji's hand on it, it is the Dirty Martini × Muji, Edition of 30 at $95, drawn after you order. If you want the cap without it, the Dirty Martini in Indian Creek Red is $65 and ships the way it is photographed. And if the price question is the one you are stuck on, I went through the money in more detail in $65 vs $200 caps.
