Where the Hat Ends and the Story Begins

Faranak Haddad & Arash Akand of Farmuk — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode 81

There is a Greek myth about three women who spin the thread of every human life. The instrument in their hands — the tool that gives each thread its length and weight — was called Farmuk. It is a strange and beautiful name to give a brand. But then, Farmuk is a strange and beautiful brand.

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, both founders of Farmuk sit together for the first time in conversation: Faranak Haddad, graphic designer, theater artist, and costume designer turned brand architect, and Arash Akand, painter turned hatmaker, who discovered in the construction of hats something no canvas had ever given him. What follows is a long, generous, genuinely fascinating conversation about what it means to make something by hand — and what making things by hand does to the person doing it.

A Name That Came First

Farmuk did not begin as a brand. It began as a name — a shelter beneath which two people with complementary instincts started experimenting, failing, and slowly finding themselves. For the first years, the name was simply a cover: a space where they could work without judgment, build without declaration, try things without consequence.

The name itself had come from Faranak. She had been thinking about it long before any hats were made. It came from Greek mythology — the Fates, the three women who spun, measured, and cut the thread of human destiny. The instrument they used was called Farmuk. For Arash, the moment she explained it was the moment he knew the name was right. It carried a philosophy inside it: that what is made by hand has weight, that time pressed into material becomes something more than material.

For several years they worked under that name without the name meaning very much. Then, gradually, it became a brand. Not because they decided it should — but because the work made it one.

The Hat as Sculpture

Arash is clear about one thing: he does not sew hats. He builds them. In Persian, there is a difference between dookhtan — to sew — and sakhtan — to construct, to bring into existence something that was not there. For Arash, that distinction is everything.

His process begins with the traditional Iranian technique of kalahmali — felt-making in which raw wool is worked and pressed by hand until it becomes a single cohesive fabric. But Arash goes further than the technique allows. He describes pulling the hat off the mold, working the material with his hands past the point where industrial process would stop, arriving at crown shapes — over forty, he estimates, perhaps fifty — that, to his knowledge, exist nowhere else in the world.

From there: patina work that transforms the surface into something that reads like leather. Tattoo needles run directly across the material. Burning with a gas iron to create forms and textures. Silver inlay. Hand-stitched seams. Stones embedded into the structure itself. Each commission becomes a new experiment — not because he plans for it to be, but because the customer arrives with a request that has never been fulfilled before, and that impossibility is exactly the condition he needs.

“The artist,” he says, “is born in patience.”

The Two-and-a-Half-Month Conversation

Faranak’s process begins somewhere different: in language. Before a single sketch is drawn, she enters into what she herself describes, only half-jokingly, as therapy. Her most recent commission lasted two and a half to three months. Approximately five or six hours of phone conversation. Twenty or thirty pages of chat messages. And through all of it, she was not working toward a hat — she was working toward a person.

Her background in graphic design trained her to think in concepts before she thinks in forms. She builds mood boards. She sketches multiple proposals. She develops a narrative around the piece before she commits to its silhouette. And she listens with a particular quality of attention — absorbing not just what the client says they want, but what they reveal about themselves in the saying of it.

The result, her clients consistently tell her, is not just a hat. It is a mirror they can wear.

Two Paths, One Brand

One of the most surprising revelations of this conversation is that Faranak and Arash almost never work together. Their commissions are separate. Their processes are separate. Even their customers are separate — identifiable, within moments of conversation, by which of the two they are meant for.

Arash’s world is the hat: maximally customized, sculptural, built from felt, rabbit fur, and sable, each one genuinely unrepeatable. Faranak’s world is wider — costume design for film and theater, conceptual collections that may take years to develop, collaborations with directors and cinematographers, personal projects she holds in notebooks until the cultural moment feels right.

They share a brand and a philosophy. They do not share a workbench. And what makes Farmuk legible as an entity — what gives it its distinctive range — is precisely this tension between two temperaments that approach the same obsession from opposite directions.

“Farmuk is a child we raised together,” Faranak says. “And we grew up alongside it.”

The Hat as Crown

What is a hat for? The question sounds simple. Neither of them gives a simple answer.

For Arash, the hat occupies the highest point of the human body — the crown, the apex, the most visible place. It is a canvas that moves through the world with its wearer. He describes a customer who traveled to France wearing one of his pieces. The messages from Paris were always the same: people stared. Strangers reached out to touch the material. She had entered a different register of being seen — not a different room, but a different category of person.

For Faranak, the answer is more structural. She is obsessed with what she calls breaking form — using clothing and headwear to disrupt the expected geometry of the body, to introduce a strange new silhouette that makes the wearer feel, as she puts it, that something has changed. Not just in how others see them. In how they see themselves in the mirror.

“Someone who comes to us,” Arash says, “is giving themselves an independent identity. They are saying: I have something you don’t have.”

Against the Trend

Both Faranak and Arash are explicit about what they refuse to do: follow trends. Faranak describes sitting on her Bakhtiari collection for years — having sketched it, built parts of it, felt ready for it — and deliberately waiting for the marketplace noise around Bakhtiari textiles to quiet. She wanted her work to arrive into stillness, not into competition.

She describes the same restraint with her Parsian collection: years of preparation, still unreleased. Not because the work is unfinished — but because the conditions are not yet right. She maintains internal benchmarks for readiness that have nothing to do with market timing and everything to do with cultural resonance.

This patience is not passivity. It is a form of respect — for the work, for the cultural material it draws from, and for the audience that will one day receive it.

The Engine of Anger

When Hossein asks each of them about the conditions under which they do their best work, Arash describes the excitement of a new tool — a gas iron he recently saw and has not yet bought, already imagining what he might do with it on felt. He describes the joy of not knowing what will happen.

Faranak’s answer is more unexpected. Her best work, she says, comes from anger. Farmuk itself was born from anger — from a rupture with the world of theater that sent her searching, urgently, for a different kind of making. When something in the cultural landscape genuinely infuriates her — repetition, complacency, a form that has become so familiar no one sees it anymore — that is when she goes to work. And that, she says, is when what emerges surprises even her.

“Farmuk was born from anger,” she says. “I left theater with a kind of fury. And I needed to do something completely different with it.”

The Brand That Is Becoming Itself

Three years ago, something shifted. Faranak describes reading a book on luxury brand strategy and recognizing Farmuk in its pages — recognizing that what they had been doing for years, almost intuitively, was the behavior of a luxury brand: limited production, handmade process, narrative-driven identity, unwillingness to scale at the cost of distinction.

That recognition led to a decision: to begin separating herself from the brand. Not abandoning it — but giving it an independent identity that could exist, and be understood, without her needing to stand beside it and explain it. For the first years, Farmuk and Faranak had been nearly the same thing. Now she wants Farmuk to be something that stands on its own — with its own story, its own character, its own mystery.

“I want Farmuk’s story to build itself over time,” she says, “until the audience holds a clear, stable image of it in their minds — without me having to explain it.”

A Dedication

When Hossein asks who they would like to dedicate this conversation to, Faranak pauses before answering. She dedicates it to herself — to the years of work and sacrifice Farmuk has cost her, to the long patience of building something that could not be rushed. And then, quietly, to God.

Arash dedicates it to Faranak. His partner, his teacher in patience — the person who showed him, by example, what it looks like to love a process so completely that the waiting itself becomes part of the work. He says, simply and without flourish, that watching her was how he learned to be an artist.