Written by Peter Weilnböck
Published on: 2023-02-23
Long rambling about buying a hat.
This is actually a topic, that I am a bit nervous about.
You may wonder about that statement. You also may wonder, why I write about buying a hat. What is this category style? In the introduction it was not mentioned that Peter is actually a fashion influencer!
And here we arrived at my conundrum. I do not like fashion. I never was a fashionable person, nor ever aspired to be one. And I most certainly am not an influencer of any kind. For me clothes always were purely utilitarian. Yes, you needed them, of course. But spending serious money on clothing? This was something I never even really considered. As far as I remember, my choice of clothes was always practical and conservative. I also did not want to stand out too much. Maybe stand out as boring.
To be frank, I always though that people that carefully consider their clothes are a bit vain, which might be the reason why I am nervous about this post.
Now, a hat - especially the type of hat I am considering - can be considered superfluous and is also not subtle. So I will stand out, and I am willing to spend quite a bit of money for that. This does not seem to match up, does it? Well, I guess, I need to go a bit further afield to explain that.
Because of my current job, and the location of said occupation, I need to wear a suit to work. Or at least be similarly smartly dressed. With time and frequent wear, some of the suits started to wear out, and needed to be replaced. And this caused my first drift in my clothing habit. I of course tried to find something that fits me and the various cheap suit stores around Tokyo, but was not able to find anything my size. The largest sizes I found were for people more than 5cm shorter than me. The next trip back to Austria was not planned at that time, but I needed a suit that fit me. The one choice I felt I had, was to buy a made to measure suit. So I did. Actually, because of a bundle price, I bought 2 at the same time. This was definitely a luxury that I was not used to, and cost more money than I had ever spent on any type of clothing before. But when I got the suits, I learned, that they fit me better. Were more comfortable. And it turned out, that they also lasted longer. Overall I learned a bit about the importance of construction and materials.
This was my first step in the direction of high quality clothing since I needed to buy my own.
The next step was shoes. I always values quality footwear, but the type of robust shoes that I liked to wear in principle, simply did not work with a suit. And as it turns out, dress shoes can be a pain. Not caring to much, I simply had followed the recommendation of the shoe store staff, bought some shoes and then wore them very frequently. And after some time, the sole came off. And the same with the next pair. You can see were this is going.
This actually was kind of an awakening for me. I was simply annoyed that I needed to throw away another pair of shoes because of shoddy construction practices.
One of my colleagues at work has clothing as one of his hobbies. Something that I never understood. But because he seemed knowledgeable in that area, I finally asked him for advice. And he explained a bit about construction methods of shoes and various high quality brands. After some time as well as some research on my own, I bought shoes from one of the “entry level” brands - Carmina. And I was surprised. The shoes felt so much more solid on my feet. And after a short break in period, they also became quite comfortable. Even more importantly - those are dress shoes I will have, until the sole wears out. And then the sole can be replaced. So, if I take care of them, they have the potential to outlast me.
I was intrigued.
While I for a long time followed the saying “how buys cheap, buys expensive” (the saying works better in German), I somehow had assumed that clothing was an exception, and you simply payed for the brand name. While this is still true in many cases, there are also rather stark differences in quality to be found.
Since I am getting more concerned about environmental issues, buying things that last is even more appealing.
Ideal would be something made locally, by an actual artisan. By a person I can talk to, not someone being exploited in a factory somewhere.
My natural sun protection is running a bit thin. So, during summer, I need something to keep the sun of my head, and in winter a bit of additional insulation also would not go amiss. When I am out in my free time, I like to wear a flat cap (not liking the look of baseball caps - in my youth the “cool kids” wore those, and I never wanted to be a “cool kid”. Or be mistaken for wanting to be cool. But I am digressing), but once again, this does not work with my work attire of a suit (or nowadays maybe trousers and a sports jacket). However, a hat might fit nicely.
With my recent obsession with quality, also in clothing, I studied a bit about hat materials, how to keep cool, etc. In principle, the result was: some type of straw should be ideal. However, straw hats are known for breaking apart rather quickly, if they are worn frequently. The straw dries out and becomes brittle. Or, if it is too wet, they might become mouldy. However, Panama hats seem to be a little more robust. One of the famous transportation methods is to roll them up, and stuff them into a tube. If it can withstand that, then it must be robust? I talked with my local milliner about it, and different to regular cloth, a panama hat actually becomes more robust the finer it is woven. This is because the most common damage, also for those hats, is cracking along the creases. And the finer the strands are, the smaller is the bend radius it can handle, before it strains too much.
Now, really high end panama hats are expensive. Prohibitively expensive. At least far out of my budget, especially since hats are not the only thing I am interested in. But, lucky for me, she had a cone left (I don’t think its called cone for panama hats, but it is called cone for felt hats, so I am using that term), that she had bought before the recent inflation and that also was reasonably fine. It lacks some of the finesse of the high end brands as Monte Cristi, or Espinal, but it is the best I can currently afford, and if I take care of it, I should have it for many years.
Of course, I do not know the details about the manufacturing of the cone, but at least the shaping of the hat is done by a person I can talk to - and the price is actually similar to of the rack hats, that would satisfy my current quality wants.
I am going to order a hat today at my local milliner. And that is fine.