Photograph-Illustration: The Minimize; Images: Amber Waves
It’s pumpkin-patch season, and even should you by no means set foot on the East Finish this fall, you will have seen the hat by now: in minimalist, sans-serif all-caps, it bears the phrases “AMBER WAVES FARM,” with the three phrases stacked on prime of one another. Some will even notice “AMAGANSETT, NY” in additional demure sort above the brim or on a sweatshirt or tee. Sightings of this small farm’s attire occur from the Coney Island boardwalk to Smith Avenue to Park Avenue, particularly the trucker hats, worn by everybody from Jenna Lyons on the Actual Housewives of New York to your co-worker who rents a home in Sag each August. It’s the look for many who will instantly get that, sure, you have been “out east,” with out you ever having to say “the Hamptons.”
“They’re a West Aspect Freeway epidemic,” says Madeline Briggs, a Tribeca-based inside designer. She’s having fun with a pumpkin patch in Water Mill together with her pals, considered one of whom is sporting the hat.
That wearer is Sophie Menges, a Hamptons resident whose household runs the Monogram Store, an area fixture for 27 years. “If you stroll round Soho, Tribeca, East Village, each single particular person is sporting them,” she says. “After I’ve had folks come go to, they’re like, ‘Can we go to Amber Waves to get the hat? I actually need to get the hat.’”
Scotty Goldbeck, a mom of two in Pasadena and summer season East Hamptonian, sees the hats at Memorial Coliseum and Griffith Park. “I noticed an Amber Waves hat yesterday,” she says, recalling the USC sport. “He wasn’t even in my part.”
“It’s develop into, in a bizarre means, sort of an iconic article of clothes,” says Goldbeck. It’s a option to say “not solely have I been to the Hamptons, I’ve been to Amagansett. It’s the distinction between a Gwyneth Paltrow–wealthy mother and your fundamental bitch in Chanel.” (Earlier this month, Blythe Danner herself informed me, “Amagansett was the un-Hamptons. It wasn’t glamorous and that’s why I appreciated it.”) The hat is a extra understanding style selection than the Kendall Roy–accredited baseball cap you should buy in East Hampton Village at Loro Piana, set among the many similar retail combine you’ll discover in Meatpacking or the Dubai Mall. Amagansett has no such flash; although, tellingly, it does have Ulla Johnson.
“There may be a cool issue related to Amagansett,” says Amanda Merrow, Amber Waves’s co-founder. A component working within the farm’s favor has been celebrities like Ina Garten, who featured Amber Waves Farm on Barefoot Contessa as early as 2009. Within the years since, Covid drove much more folks to the East Finish. Once they returned to town, they introduced again a way of nation delight that dangers inducing eye-rolls. The trucker hat is a sublime workaround, since Amber Waves is a sustainable, women-owned, native nonprofit. It makes the hat the perfect harvest-season flex: I used to be out East, post-summer season, for native produce and small-town residing. The hat is on the market in gold and orange colorways, for good measure.
From left: Pumpkins? Examine. Merch? Examine. Photograph: Dane A. WisherPhotograph: Dane A. Wisher
From left: Pumpkins? Examine. Merch? Examine. Photograph: Dane A. WisherPhotograph: Dane A. Wisher
Merrow says, “Small farms are nimble. They’re gathering locations, they’re employers, they usually feed folks. And so having a culturally related, proactive farm in a group, I feel is actually significant.”
This small farm has sidewalk frontage on Freeway 27, the Hamptons’ most important artery, which jibes with its founding mission to interact future farmers and the general public alike. As a instructing farm, it’s open year-round and there’s no admission to get onto the property. It runs an apprentice program and 17 of its former staff and apprentices have based their very own farms. Merrow sees this as crucial to an trade the place the typical age is 58, whereas, she tells me, the U.S. is dropping farmland the dimensions of Rhode Island yearly.
When Merrow and her fellow co-founder, Katie Baldwin, began, the 2 of them labored a single acre themselves. They offered eggs on the respect system. They wore the free hats that got here with their tractors from Wengers of Myerstown — till folks thought the farm was named Wengers.
Maybe to the horror of graphic designers all over the place, Baldwin went into Microsoft Phrase and created a JPEG of what they’d name the Triple Stack — the three-word textual content brand. That trucker hat is their prime attire vendor: roughly 6,000 per 12 months now, and most of these are brick-and-mortar gross sales.
Amber Waves now owns the ten acres across the market, leases a further 25, and is at present searching for extra. It employs 40 year-round employees, largely ladies, with dozens extra within the top of the busy season. “Our unique clients miss these quiet and quaint days,” says Merrow, “however it might have been onerous for us to be sustainable and keep on that degree.”
After I meet Merrow on the farm stand, it’s a breezy October day and the out of doors tables are largely occupied with clientele who appear extra keen on Golden Goose than precise fowl. Others peruse the market, analyzing pickle jars, child bok choy, and, in fact, hats.
Initially global-food-policy wonks, Merrow and Baldwin discovered one another at an apprenticeship at close by Quail Hill Farm. They cherished the dust and seeing literal fruits of their labor. Their unique enterprise germ was to give attention to the underappreciated wheat crop — therefore Amber Waves. They’ve since diversified to 500 styles of 60 crops, and donated over 25,000 kilos of it to locals experiencing meals insecurity this 12 months. “One of many causes that I see a future in small sustainable ag is that farms simply have the chance to reply their very own native inhabitants’s challenges,” Merrow says. It’s unlikely most individuals sporting the hats are interested by that as they jog previous Little Island or sip bottomless mimosas at brunch, but it surely’s an ethos that blunts the impact of claiming you have been within the Hamptons.
“I’ve observed in an airport anyone sporting an Amber Waves Farm hat, and it all the time provides me slightly heat, cozy feeling,” says Rachel Fleit, a filmmaker and home-owner in Springs, the close by village the place extra residents are inclined to stay year-round. That is the place Merrow additionally lives.
However Fleit doesn’t personal a trucker hat, regardless of purchasing ceaselessly at Amber Waves, as a result of it looks like a memento. “If I used to be not native, or not a year-round resident, I’d completely need the trucker hat.”
When folks see the hat, Merrow needs them “to consider understanding their farmer and remembering that all the things that you just eat on daily basis got here from a farmer or a fisherman. There are folks behind that meals.”
Merrow reveals me a more recent hat designed by considered one of Amber Waves’s personal farmers: It’s a hat that reveals a goat sporting the Triple Stack trucker hat. “We don’t take ourselves too critically,” she says.