I’m addicted to hats, for two main reasons, first they make you look more distinguished, second I’m prone to sinusitis and a hat helps me avoiding bad headaches.
I love Spring and Summer, but I often don’t like the hats available during these seasons, as they all look too banal or extremely out of fashion. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Borsalino’s Spring/Summer 09 collection in a window shop.
As you might know the Alessandria-based company Borsalino created the famous eponymous hat that became an icon of style. The hat production started in April 1857 in Alessandria when Giuseppe Borsalino - a young man who had learnt the milliner’s trade in Paris in 1850 - bought and enlarged a hat factory that from then on, started producing roughly 750,000 hats a year.
After Giuseppe’s death the factory was managed by his son Teresio and production increased throughout the years. Soon Borsalino became synonymous with high quality hats – bowler and cloche hats, berets, top hats, panamas and so on – worn by famous people all over the world, from Giuseppe Verdi and Fred Astaire to Humphrey Bogart, Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra and even cardinals and popes.
As hats went out of fashion the company went through a major crisis that culminated in the 1980s, when Borsalino decided to diversify its production and began manufacturing also clothing and accessory lines. Later on the company also opened a museum where it exhibited beautiful hats such as the bowler hat that belonged to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, the Shah of Persia’s top hat, Ezra Pound’s hat and Pancho Villa’s gold charro.
Borsalino’s S/S 09 collection features the brand’s classic panama hats for men, but for women there is a wider choice that includes cloche hats and broad brimmed straw hats with printed motifs that look like tattoos (see the "Portofino" hat - second picture, third hat from the top) or with beautiful and almost architectural details along the brim, in natural or dyed straw (mainly pale/dark blue or white). In some cases the straw around the brim is bent and folded to create wave-like motifs and, for women who really want to dare, there is also a straw turban (first picture in this post, the headdress on the right in natural straw or third picture in this post, third hat from the top, in dark blue straw) that actually look like a taller and more minimalist version of Egyptian style Art Deco head-dresses.
Another quite striking piece for this season is the crossover cloche-calot hat entirely covered in feathers dyed in different shades of blue (third image in this post – near the white hat with the large brim). The hat is called "Ara Macao" in homage to the Scarlet Macaw. I love the way the row of pale blue feathers looks like a little fringe, yet the shape and silhouette of the hat makes it look a bit like a helmet. I think it’s the sort of piece you really need to look like a rebellious and modern flapper. Prices for such hats start at around €190, yet dreaming of owning a rather extravagant feathered calot hat is entirely free.
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