Mister Parmesan: A comical new source of apparel for pasta lovers

Samuel Schiffer life with pasta on the mind each and every working day, but now he’s received pasta on his head. Even though the chef functions with the edible edition as guide pasta maker at Pasadena’s Semolina Artisanal Pasta, his new outfits line, Mister Parmesan, puts the carb entrance and heart on bucket hats, tees, stickers, totes and beanies.

“All I do is stare at pasta all working day,” suggests Schiffer, who launched the line this month with his girlfriend, graphic designer Catherine Soulé. “I just observe these devices extrude hundreds of lbs of pasta in a sitting, and all I do is think about pasta. Everything in my brain is pasta all the time.”

The comical side undertaking is a normal evolution of Schiffer’s day work getting ready new and dried pasta for Semolina’s storefront and its cafe wholesale accounts, as perfectly as controlling workers and recipe tests. It was also born of kitchen area requirement: California health and fitness and basic safety codes have to have staff who get ready and handle foods to wear some type of hair restraint. The cook experienced currently used his occupation acquiring and rapidly sweating as a result of hats in the kitchens of A.O.C., Freedman’s and other L.A. dining establishments, so why not make his have and devote them to pasta?

On a lark Schiffer, 29, asked “What if?” and envisioned a western-type rope font that spelled out “spaghetti” in cursive, like a tattoo, and Soulé, 30, received to perform. Now there are “bucatini” bucket hats in bubbly neon lettering “lasagna” trucker hats in navy and gold “ziti” caps where by the word is formed with lightning bolts and a “linguine” beanie offered in black, white and Dodger blue. (The bestseller so far, he admits, is the layout that commenced it all: the pink “spaghetti” rope-font father hat.)

“I have no manner history,” Schiffer suggests. “I have, like, 50 percent a literature degree from Bard Higher education and again complications. That is basically all I’m coming to the get together with.”

Soulé, nevertheless, has served as an art director or graphic designer for makes these types of as Goop, Adidas, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Aeropostale and put her skills — usually reserved for commercials and branding — to perform, bringing an anthropomorphic, cane-toting, leading-hatted wheel of cheese to daily life.

Motivated by the Warner Bros.’ singing and dancing Michigan J. Frog, Mister Parmesan (complete identify: Delaware J. Parmesan) is the mustachioed, vaudeville-spirited face of the manufacturer. He appears during the line’s Instagram account along with vintage cookbook photos and retro meal scenes where by the outdated-timey dishes and dinner company are noticed sporting the pasta-have on, which is Photoshopped into the previous photographs.

“I imagine Mister Parmesan is aspirational,” Schiffer states. “I believe he’s trying or reaching to an strategy of refinement and class, but it is shrimp and olives in a Jell-O mildew. It just felt appropriate.”

In 1 picture, a corduroy “rigatoni” cap sits jauntily atop a Xmas-tree-like arrangement of lobster in an additional, an upside-down “bucatini” bucket hat serves as the bowl for shrimp cocktail. Schiffer hopes to start a newsletter, composed as Mister Parmesan, sharing recipes and shots from his own collection of previous cookbooks and recommending “restaurants that are bizarre and previous and not amazing,” or those steeped in that very same vintage aesthetic.

The Mister Parmesan line introduced in early March, with initially orders currently being mailed afterwards this thirty day period the duo hope to inventory their pasta fashions in nearby, hyper-curated corner merchants and cookware stores, which include Semolina Artisanal Pasta — operator Leah Ferrazzani has already available to provide them in her Pasadena pasta storefront. The model is striving to preserve manufacturing regional, functioning with Glendale’s Stitch Art for embroidery and display screen printing.

The program is to regularly roll out new models, these as shirts with stacked pasta conditions printed on them, and expand to items these kinds of as slippers and socks. It’s a goofy, wearable art task and a love letter to pasta, and nothing, they say, is off-restrictions.

“The amount of money of stuff that we made and did not put up on the site is stupefying,” Schiffer claims. “We have some really crazy matters where by we have been like, ‘This is too nuts and also much too numerous issues to do for the initially operate.’ We’ve received so a lot silly stuff coming, you have no plan.”