For a song

US: Singer Aretha Franklin’s hat is worth millions to the appropriately named Luke Song. The Detroit milliner designed the hat Franklin wore when she sang at US President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Now thousands of women want a hat like it.

Song owns Mr Song Millinery on Woodward Avenue. In recent weeks, he has received more than 5,000 orders for the latest version of the Aretha Hat. Although he will not make an exact replica of the hat Franklin wore, he is producing a spring version in several different colours. The hats cost $179 each.

Song told The New York Times that he had designed several possible hats for the beloved singer. The one she chose was grey with a large rhinestone bow. “I’m so glad she chose that one,” he says. “It was the one I was pushing her to wear.”

Last year, Song’s business had sales of $1 million. This year, thanks to the Aretha Hat, he expects sales of up to $7 million. Song currently employs 11 people; he would like to double that number, but is having trouble finding experienced seamstresses because, he says, millinery is “a dead art”.

Luke Song's dream is to sell a hat to Michelle Obama. "That would be the best day of my life," he says.

Song, who studied art at the New School for Design in New York, did not originally plan to become a milliner. But after designing a hat when he needed money to continue his studies, he decided that millinery was a lot like sculpture. The 36-year-old son of Korean immigrants has been selling hats to Aretha Franklin for years. Now he would like to sell a hat to Michelle Obama. “That would be the best day of my life,” he says. “The best.”

Meanwhile, Franklin has lent the hat to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the world’s largest museum complex. It will be moved to Obama’s presidential library when he leaves office.