Can you help me Identify this borsalino?

[oldschoolnew$$$]

Hey guys, just wondering if you can shed some light on this fedora.
Just wondering how old it may be.
Vintage Borsalino Antica Casa Felt Fedora Hat Men's Made in Italy 62 7 3/4
With a 2.5 inch brim.
any help is appreciated.

 

[Pellie]

Hey guys, just wondering if you can shed some light on this fedora.
Just wondering how old it may be.
Vintage Borsalino Antica Casa Felt Fedora Hat Men's Made in Italy 62 7 3/4
With a 2.5 inch brim.
any help is appreciated.

I would say late 80's early 90's, but @steur would know better i think.

 

[steur]

Hey guys, just wondering if you can shed some light on this fedora.
Just wondering how old it may be.
Vintage Borsalino Antica Casa Felt Fedora Hat Men's Made in Italy 62 7 3/4
With a 2.5 inch brim.
any help is appreciated.

I would say late 80's early 90's, but @steur would know better i think.

Agree with @Pellie. Sweatbands and sizing stickers don't change much after the early eighties. It has lost its liner.

 

[jeffgarf]

Is there no white tag under the sweatband on the side opposite the bow? If there is, post the photo and I can help you date it based upon the number on the right side. The first 2 numeric digits are the year of the model.

 

[steur]

Is there no white tag under the sweatband on the side opposite the bow? If there is, post the photo and I can help you date it based upon the number on the right side. The first 2 numeric digits are the year of the model.

That used to be the idea, but it turned out not to be true. The first two digits corresponding with the production year only holds up for the years 1976-1983 when a specific type of label was used.
This page from a Borsalino catalog from 1988-1989 shows numbers that start with 11, so not 88 or 89.

 

[jeffgarf]

That used to be the idea, but it turned out not to be true. The first two digits corresponding with the production year only holds up for the years 1976-1983 when a specific type of label was used.
This page from a Borsalino catalog from 1988-1989 shows numbers that start with 11, so not 88 or 89.
View attachment 692071

Those are not the numbers I was referring to. On the label they are usually a combination of numbers, with the first 2 digits being numbers, but not necessarily the rest. I own many (admittedly some came without stickers) and have worked on several over the years (over 40 just 2 weeks ago) and the sticker method was pretty darn accurate. In fact, from 99 through the 2017 bankruptcy year, I think they all corresponded to the production year. Granted, most of the ones I worked on were for the religious market, so of course, milage may vary. This is a '97

 

[steur]

Those are not the numbers I was referring to. On the label they are usually a combination of numbers, with the first 2 digits being numbers, but not necessarily the rest. I own many (admittedly some came without stickers) and have worked on several over the years (over 40 just 2 weeks ago) and the sticker method was pretty darn accurate. In fact, from 99 through the 2017 bankruptcy year, I think they all corresponded to the production year. Granted, most of the ones I worked on were for the religious market, so of course, milage may vary. This is a '97 View attachment 692084

It might hold up in some cases. Don't know about the religious market specifically, but there are too many examples that make this questionable at least as a method. Here are a few examples:

1960? Not likely.

1928? Certainly not.

2024? No, this was not made last year.

1926? Again: no.

As much as I'd like to find a method for accurately dating these hats, this is not the one.

 

[jeffgarf]

Are any of those from the mid-70's until 2017? I think that's the period where they did it. The hat I posted was a standard Borsalino, sold regularly. I think the real 50+ year vintage did not follow this, but perhaps we can agree that 70's - 2017 did?

 

[jeffgarf]

Hold everything. From the owner of Bencraft Hatters in Brooklyn - "Borsalino hats hats made since 1994 will have a year code printed on the label. Before that, it was just a six digit number . Prior to that there were year code from 1976 until 1985 when the factory moved to its present location."

He mentioned this 2 years prior to bankruptcy (in 2015) so I think the 2017 date for the end still holds.

 

[Daniele Tanto]

That used to be the idea, but it turned out not to be true. The first two digits corresponding with the production year only holds up for the years 1976-1983 when a specific type of label was used.

Are any of those from the mid-70's until 2017? I think that's the period where they did it. The hat I posted was a standard Borsalino, sold regularly. I think the real 50+ year vintage did not follow this, but perhaps we can agree that 70's - 2017 did?

Hold everything. From the owner of Bencraft Hatters in Brooklyn - "Borsalino hats hats made since 1994 will have a year code printed on the label. Before that, it was just a six digit number . Prior to that there were year code from 1976 until 1985 when the factory moved to its present location."

He mentioned this 2 years prior to bankruptcy (in 2015) so I think the 2017 date for the end still holds.

This is a question debated several times on the thread dedicated to Borsalino. There have been various speculations to understand how old a Borsalino was and the various combinations to deduce the age have come to the conclusion that Stefan illustrates, quoted here in the first quote. The rest are suppositions that do not lead to any practical result. A few steps forward is to have a catalog with which to compare the hats contained with the dating of the catalog, for the rest it is an enigma. Second consideration, browsing the news on Borsalino over the years: I believe there has been a change in cataloging the hats according to the properties that have guided Borsalino during its long history.

 

[jeffgarf]

I believe there has been a change in cataloging the hats according to the properties that have guided Borsalino during its long history.

That now certainly seems to be the case.

 

[steur]

Hold everything. From the owner of Bencraft Hatters in Brooklyn - "Borsalino hats hats made since 1994 will have a year code printed on the label. Before that, it was just a six digit number . Prior to that there were year code from 1976 until 1985 when the factory moved to its present location."

He mentioned this 2 years prior to bankruptcy (in 2015) so I think the 2017 date for the end still holds.

It’s worth taking a bit of a deeper dive into. On the lounge the interests lie with the older, real vintage hats, so the newer hats are often dismissed as being “just” a modern Borsalino (a bit unfair to the quality they can still produce, but there we are).
I know of the information shared by the owner of Bencraft @besdor here on the lounge, that the labels from 1976 until 1985 had a year code. They did and they can be recognized by the hyphen between the year and the rest of the code.
Like this:

However we’ve never found one with a yearcode later that 1983, so the enddate 1985 for that period is unverified. After that the new labels using the dot matrix printer were introduced. Now the question is of these labels ever had a year code, with the first two numbers being the production year or not.

There are differences between the numbers. Some have just a six number code which cannot have a relation to the production year (as the examples above in my previous post show), but others have a longer code, also using letters, which might point towards a year, same as was done in the 1976-1983 (or 1985) period. I’ll have look at the examples of modern Borsalinos I have and had and see if we could back that idea up with data, maybe only from 1994 onwards. If that is the case it is certainly helpful in dating the Borsalinos we find. Modern Borsalinos deserve some attention too.

 

[jeffgarf]

Also, don't forget, especially for Borsalinos whose quality remained up through last decade, the word "Vintage" may include up to 10 years more hats than they did back in 2015, so the interest in knowing this for Borsalinos is still there. @Daniele Tanto still has the best idea and a public source catalogue of some kind could probably be created with the concrete information FL members have now.

 

[steur]

Also, don't forget, especially for Borsalinos whose quality remained up through last decade, the word "Vintage" may include up to 10 years more hats than they did back in 2015, so the interest in knowing this for Borsalinos is still there. @Daniele Tanto still has the best idea and a public source catalogue of some kind could probably be created with the concrete information FL members have now.

We didn't dive deep enough into the modern Borsalinos and maybe we should have. Looking more closely you make a good case that there are modern labels that seem to refer to a date, whereas others don't. I looked at all the labels of modern Borsalinos I kept a picture of and this is what I found. No need to post the pictures of the modern dot matrix labels with the six numbers on them again. Nothing on those points towards a production year. well nothing obvious at least.
My theory is that these were in use from 1984 until 1993. I think it must have been 1984, because this was a watershed year for Borsalino after the death of Teresio Usuelli in 1983, who had led the company (after the death of Teresio Borsalino in 1939) until 1979. The factory moved in 1984 to a different location and left the original location in the centre of Alessandria.
On to the others. These are ten of the ones I found.

All of the first two numbers before the letter A or P of these range between 94 and 13 (which was the latest I found). For a moment I thought the P could be referring to "Paglia" (straw) because I found it on that one, but it is on felts as well. All of them have a six digit number after the first to numbers and the letter, same as before.
Unfortunately none of these have any other date on them or came with a receipt that could confirm the theory. Maybe others here have ones that are dated; we'll have to see.
For now it seems plausible but not yet confirmed that for these labels the first two numbers do refer to the production year. I'd call that a result.