The World's Finest Panama Hat

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/08/340682706/hes-just-woven-the-worlds-finest-panama-hat-but-who-will-buy-it

by js2 • 11 years ago

131 60 11 years ago

npr.org

idoh• 11 years ago

I had the privilege of trying out a $15,000 Panama hat. There is a qualitative difference between a $100 Panama hat and a $15,000 dollar one, but still, paying $15,000 or more for a hat is quite a luxury acquisition.

A finer weave makes them a lot smoother, lighter, and more flexible, which is useful in really hot and humid climates. The guy in the shop said that the daily progress for such a hat is adding about a centimeter to the hat each day.

noir_lord2• 11 years ago

I think it's like watches, once you go above $100 dollars you are out of "I want a practical accessory" and into "I want to own something rare and/or unique".

I guess if you have the money it looks like a good deal, I can't imagine spending $15,000 on a hat but then I can't imagine spending it on much of anything (a car perhaps).

hellodevnull• 11 years ago

I don't know much about watch culture (I have a $10 Casio) but I heard someone say that a $1,000 watch is expensive, but a $30,000 watch is an investment. Not sure if people really pay attention to watches but Google "investing in a watch" and there's plenty of articles about it.

js2• 11 years ago

It's interesting that there are still products (hats, watches, cars, ...) for which the finest examples are made by craftsmen with enormous skill, and not by machine.

sebastianavina• 11 years ago

I want something rare and unique, lets buy an off the shelf, mass produced iWatch for USD 17k.

Sometimes there is just no viable explanation for human behavior.

leephillips3• 11 years ago

The author, Roff Smith, seems to be a talented guy. Not only is this good to read, the photographs, by Smith, are excellent.

niels_olson5• 11 years ago

In 1999 I met an English professor on a Navy frigate. He had made friends with a reservist of Chinese decent. When we arrived in Manta, Ecuador, there was a transportation strike; the whole city smelled of tuna. We went to a Chinese restaurant and the chinamen struck a deal: we would help load the restauraunteur's pick-up with frozen shrimp from a warehouse in the mountains; he would take us to Montecristi to buy some hats.

I sat in the back, with no seat (he had taken the seat out to haul more shrimp). We drove up the mountain dirt roads for an hour to the warehouse. It was guarded by men with automatic rifles. We loaded 20 sacks of frozen shrimp and drove another hour, deeper, to Montecristi.

The villagers were quite happy to meet us, as no one was coming to visit due to the strike in town. I bought three hats: a gorgeous open weave hat for my wife, a fino for my brother, and a veri fino for myself. I had the villagers block mine as a fedora, but it would take some time to get made. The man brought it to me the next day, at the pier, having riden his bicycle all the way from Montecristi. I paid $50 for that hat, including delivery. 25 strands per inch, or 625 weaves per inch. Outside of Brent Black's shop in Honolulu, I have never seen a finer hat.

Brent Black quoted me, sight-unseen, that hat would fetch in the ballpark of $400 in his shop.

I still wear it now and again. I have sewn in inner and outer bands of 1.5" black ribbon. The professor, Whiskey Charlie, bought himself a hat, as did the chinaman. And we drove two hours back to town, with those slowly thawing shrimp bouncing around with us.

Manta was the first place I saw a whale breach.

crimsonalucard4• 11 years ago

"Chinamen" is kind of racist. I, being chinese, am not personally offended, nor do I really care, but "chinaman" is generally considered to not be a nice word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)

I'm only bringing it up in case you are unaware, cracker.

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

Funny you should mention that. I almost wondered if the parent was using the term deliberately. It made the entire story feel as if it had been written in the US in the 1950s. I was reading it in the style of a 1950s detective story.

an_ko2• 11 years ago

I think it would be good for the language if we try to "de-escalate" the usage of neutral-looking words that are currently considered offensive. Carefully re-introducing them when the tone is clearly not racist—like here—might be a good way to do that.

"Chinaman" feels like an excellent renaturalisation target, given it is borderline.

defen• 11 years ago

Yeah, anyone who has seen The Big Lebowski would know that it is not the preferred nomenclature.

benkuykendall• 11 years ago

(sidestepping any politics and instead discussing grammar)

Anyone know why the use of demonyms as nouns is inconsistent? "American" is used as to denote one individual, while "Chinese" is always used as a collective noun.

jmadsen• 11 years ago

It was a good point to bring up, and I'm glad you did, but would have been a better post to also say what the preferred term is, especially as "a Chinese" is confusing to people.

I _believe_ "a Chinese man/woman/guy/programmer" is the most correct way to say it, using it as an adjective (at least that's how I get around it).

niels_olson5• 11 years ago

I was unaware, thanks. Although I did think about the word choice... "Chinese? That's gender-neutral, not informative. Chinese man? too long. Chinaman. Dude, from China, with a little nostalgia. Nailed it.

Cracker

Awww... I feel the love!

crimsonalucard4• 11 years ago

You kids may not be old enough to remember, but back in the day ICs were hand carved by artisans. We'd sit for days with a microscope and a nano blade etching the traces bit by bit into the wafer.

tinco• 11 years ago

In 2007, he was already known as the best weaver alive, he made $20 per month according to this documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZ4DoIdSwA

He does not own a panama hat, he could never afford to keep something he works on for months.

Not making a point or anything, just interesting to see such a big wealth divide between the maker and the buyer.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

That makes me wonder why something like the Internet doesn't change this guy's financial situation. So you could, with a camera phone and something like an international version of Stripe, have this guy finish a hat, upload a picture of it to the web, sell it, and then hand it off to a person he pays to take it into town and to ship it.

omegant• 11 years ago

This is the site of ecuatorian women cooperative. As you may imagine the site is not very up to date nor useful, but it has an email and telephone number. It's so unupdated that seems genuine to me. I think I'll try it. http://www.unioncañari.com/index.php/home

tricolon• 11 years ago

Brent Black, the hat dealer mentioned in the article, has a problem that is itching for a solution:

Manually counting the rows of weave is a tedious task.
If there are any inventors out there, the ideal scanner would be about the size of the handheld scanners I’ve seen used at the checkout register in some stores. The scanner would have a one inch by one inch reading window that would be placed against the surface of the hat. The user would push a button or pull a “trigger” and the scanner would scan the rows of weave both horizontally and vertically. The LED readout would report that the hat is 23-27-621.
Call me when you have my scanner ready.

http://www.brentblack.com/pages/panamahatgrades2.html

oxymoron• 11 years ago

Shouldn't be that hard, right? Pocket microscopes already exists and as far as computer vision algorithms go, it's not a very complex problem.

brianbreslin• 11 years ago

could the optics in an iphone or decent android phone scan/capture high enough resolution to count the strands?

mr_luc• 11 years ago

Oh, wow -- it's crazy to see an article on Hacker News about Pile (the village that the weaver in the article is from). I have a house 4 minutes from Pile and have some good friends from there.

I spent the past 7 years in those exact villages on the coast, including Pile: El Aromo, Liguiqui, San Lorenzo, Las Piñas, El Abra, Santa Rosa, San Pedro 6, and finally Pile (in order of their distance from Manta along the highway).

The article is correct that the finest Panama hats are not made in Montecristi, but in Pile (although there were a good number of weavers in El Aromo as well, more picked-over by the dealers).

One thing the article doesn't mention are the occasional abortive attempts to collectivize, and to wrest some degree of control away from the dealers and towards the hat producers. Pile, for instance, recently built a pretty little hat museum, and tours of mostly European/US tourists are brought through from time to time to take pictures and see where the hats are made.

But the gulf between the dealers and the weavers is enormous. Most weavers, when they move upwards ... move out of weaving. For instance, the coastal fishing economy is going through really hard times at the moment, but even so a fisherman can make 2 or 3x what a weaver does. Even someone doing machete work will probably net more per month than a weaver. Which is why most of the weavers in terms of volume are probably women; little old ladies with sunken chests from leaning on the rounded stone that holds the work in place.

nicwolff• 11 years ago

My father wrote essentially this article for Connoisseur Magazine in 1983; you can see the cover, with a zoomable photo of the hat that was made for him then in the hinterlands of Ecuador, here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B004MKRY30

The crown of that hat is about 6.5 inches across. Can you count the weaves in one inch? The NPR article claims 4000 weaves per square inch, or about 63 in each direction - I think Dad's has at least that!

I'll try to dig up the text of Dad's article, it was pretty interesting.

The World's Finest Panama Hat

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