Hat Business

I do love hats so it’s always a pleasure looking around at the new headgear trends during trade shows.

It's easy to pretend I am Lucien out of Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions walking around the Wooden Galleries and admiring the milliners' windows full of impossible hats and bonnets displayed "apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top".

“On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?”, Balzac wondered in the book and I admit I asked myself the same question after visiting a few stands at the Pitti show.

As usual the quality of the Borsalino designs was outstanding both for men and women’s styles, but it looked as if the brand focused on two main trends: exaggerated shapes and silhouettes for women and, for men, a mix of interesting prints (a classic Borsalino hat with a blown up print of woollen knits) and trilby or coppola hats made with interesting fabric collages including tweed and a dark red velvety damask.

I must admit I preferred the men’s styles since they looked more stylish and practical and less fussy especially compared to the women’s leprechaun-style hats in black or green that I found as slightly too extreme. 

Talking about women’s styles, Lika’s stand proved rather interesting: Lisa Maria Cestaro created for her brand Lika a variety of styles, including classic felt turbans and cloche hats and bonnets, berets and Napoleon style hats in see-through PVC.

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