In what era were the best hats in America made?

[facade]

Now before you say the 40's, please read on.

I am not asking when your personal favorite style was en vogue. Rather when was the greatest confluence of skill, technology, raw materials, & options.

Are the 40's eliminated by the move away from mercury? Are the innovations of the 20's and 30's the deciding factor or were you better off before the formation of the large corporations? Was the workforce more skilled or raw materials better during one period or another? Did modern machinery make for better hats than those hand-crafted? Did increasing labor costs drive down the quality of the later eras?

Opine.

 

[TomS]

Now before you say the 40's, please read on.

I am not asking when your personal favorite style was en vogue. Rather when was the greatest confluence of skill, technology, raw materials, & options.

Are the 40's eliminated by the move away from mercury? Are the innovations of the 20's and 30's the deciding factor or were you better off before the formation of the large corporations? Was the workforce more skilled or raw materials better during one period or another? Did modern machinery make for better hats than those hand-crafted? Did increasing labor costs drive down the quality of the later eras?

Opine.

I think the present day is the pinnacle of hat making. With the advent of modern communication and transportation wonderful materials can be had by skilled craftsman, who can in turn bring great products to market.

Just my .02
Best,
Tom

 

[fedoracentric]

The pinnacle of the hat maker's art in the USA was between the year 1900 and 1940 or so.

The hats in this 40 some year period were the best America produced. Mass production was perfected, but enough of the old quality and hand work was still in use to assure the quality. The sweatbands, liners, final touches and the felt work were never better and suffered afterward as manufacturers began to seriously cut costs.

Most especially the leather sweats suffered after this era. They went from being finely produced leather items with panache to thick, plain, unadorned hunks of leather after this era. The sweats were the first part of the hat market to show the cut backs in excellence required by making things cheaper for producers to manufacture.

From reading some of the hat industry journals I've found here at the Lounge, it seems that hat wearing began to fade even as early as the 30s and I guess as fewer hats were selling hat quality suffered as hat makers began to try and save bottom-line money. And we know that by the 1960s most hat makers were going out of business.

Now, I prefer the larger brims so my favorite styles are 40s era hats. So, I am not even talking about hats I mike more for my style.

But to me the finest examples of the the hat maker's art were seen in the teens, 20s, and 30s are unsurpassed in excellence even as I am not a big fan of the very high crowns and short brims generally more popular in these eras.

Finally, today's factory produced hats are universally junk compared to the best that American manufactures produced in the teens, 20s and 30s. To me that is inarguable.

 

[gtdean48]

After WW2 to the mid to late 50s based on the hats I have handled.
I have personally touched anything before the war.

 

[Dinerman]

I think the present day is the pinnacle of hat making. With the advent of modern communication and transportation wonderful materials can be had by skilled craftsman, who can in turn bring great products to market.

Just my .02
Best,
Tom

Sweatband from a modern high end custom hatter at bottom. Sweatband from a 1920s production hat at top.

 

[alanfgag]

It would be pretty hard to compete with the scale, tooling and skill in the first couple of decades of the 20th C.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Also to be considered is the price of raw materials. Data shows that the wholesale price of beaver pelts increased from about $1.50 in 1916 to around $14 in 1920, only dropping back below $5 or so by about 1930. I would imagine that this would have led to a greater proportion of hat bodies containing less and less beaver through the 1920s. Did the felt ever recover? Apparel Arts says in 1932 that 90% of hats sold are of rabbit felt.

And, "sales of fifteen to forty dollar hats, in the almost immediate past, was large. … But hat sales above ten dollars are now almost negligible."

So, 1920 and earlier would most likely generate a "better" hat for my reasons, and those stated above.

 

[TheDane]

I think the present day is the pinnacle of hat making. With the advent of modern communication and transportation wonderful materials can be had by skilled craftsman, who can in turn bring great products to market.

Yeah, and it seems more than strange, we're crowding up in cheap junkfood chain-stores, eating lukewarm, limp strings of deep fried potato-powder-jelly, calling it "french-fries"! My mother and grandmother knew of 8-10 different potato sorts and their very different properties - a knowledge necessary to the making of traditional Danish food. Today, we barely know what a potato is!

If you today tried to sew a sweatband with tight stitches as the ones in Dinerman's picture above, the leather would most likely break between the stitches. The skin of animals as such hasn't changed - but our ways of breading animals have changed and so have our ways of treating the hides. "Wonderful materials"? Hardly!

The wood we grow today has extremely low structural strength, due to modern speedy growth-techniques and speedy curing/maturing of the cut wood. I live in a country where no one lives farther than 30 miles away from the sea. Every day I see how fast cars rust away nowadays. Hardly "wonderful materials", either.

We may have invented "wonderful materials" and our means of communication and transport are a no doubt lot better today. The problem (as I see it) is, that we have gained a lot of skills, but lost just as many - and the lost ones are often very important.

Our grandparents must be rotating in their graves like highspeed ventilator fans! With our theoretical possibilities in mind, it's quite remarkable how poorly we do in so many ways. I'm afraid, that better products on the mainstream markets will take a major cultural revolution among us all ... providers as well as consumers [huh]

- just another 20 cents

 

[facade]

My bad, I should have said what decade.. era is far too vague and broad. Heck if you are bold, narrow it down to a single year!

 

[Baron Kurtz]

1900-1920. At a push, I'd reduce that to "pre-WWI".

 

[tonyb]

April 17, 1917.

11:14 a.m., Eastern TIme

 

[tonyb]

But seriously ...

Hell, I dunno. I've owned scores of vintage hats. More than a hundred, I'd think. And I've handled hundreds of others.

But so few of them date from before 1930 or so, and so few of those really, really old ones survived in anything that might accurately be called a good condition, that I can't say with any confidence just how good they were back then, at least in comparison to the ones made a decade or two or three later.

I am, however, willing to argue that hats every bit the equal of the hats made in the 1940s and '50s can be and are made today, by any of several custom hat makers using materials readily (more or less) available. Hell, our own Art Fawcett is making hats from beaver felt bodies blended with chinchilla, and another variety blended with mink and ermine. Those bodies don't quite qualify as "readily available," but their very existence shows us what can be done with materials made in 2013.

And I'm confident I could demonstrate to any reasonable observer that even the all-beaver bodies (no mink, no chinchilla, etc.) available these days can take a finish to rival anything made 70 and 80 years ago -- anything with which I have any familiarity, at any rate, and I have more than a passing familiarity. It takes some practice to produce such a finish, but it can indeed be done.

I just wish that more modern ribbon measured up to the old stuff. There is some darned good ribbon made these days, but there's a whole lot of modern ribbon that is, well, junk. Alas, it's the stuff you find on most modern mass-produced hats.

 

[GoldenEraFan]

I think we can all agree that the affordable massed produced hats of today can't match by a long shot the quality of affordable massed produced hats of pre-1960.

 

[tonyb]

I think we can all agree that the affordable massed produced hats of today can't match by a long shot the quality of affordable massed produced hats of pre-1960.

I would never dispute that the typical mass-produced hats of 50-plus years ago are clearly superior to the mass-produced hats made these days. But "affordable" can mean very different things to different people.

 

[ManofKent]

I think we can all agree that the affordable massed produced hats of today can't match by a long shot the quality of affordable massed produced hats of pre-1960.

Not living in the US I can't easily comment on the average standard of vintage US hats, but have been impressed with those I've bought. From a UK perspective though, whilst there are plenty of very nice pre-60's hats out there, they're not universally wonderful. Felt quality is typically better than most modern mass-produced hats, but some are pretty mediocre, and the ribbon work isn't always much better. Certainly sweatbands on some vintage English hats are pretty grim extremely cheap and thin leather.

 

[mayserwegener]

It would be pretty hard to compete with the scale, tooling and skill in the first couple of decades of the 20th C.

End of story! Also see France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czecho-Slovakia, ect!

 

[facade]

1930s

My pick is the 1930s because I am partial to Cavanagh edged hats.

However I wish I knew more about early 1900's hats. We really celebrate the companies that became the biggies here, but in the early part of the century there many other hat companies. There was even a hat company near where I grew up in Binghamton, NY called J.E. Raymond Hat Manufacturer.



Post WWI there were "9820 different numbers of soft hats alone in the Knox and Dunlap lines". So the early part of the century seemingly offered the greatest variety of choice. Before modernization and advertising crushed the little guys and streamlined the companies offerings.

One company alone offering nearly 10,000 different variations. Even if you halve the amount for duplication between the two lines, that's still around 5,000 different variations to choose from. Wow.

Oh and another thing, I really like the old style embossed sweatband logos over the later more print-like gold logos.

 

[tonyb]

A look at street scene photos from that era offers all the explanation one might need for all those hat models on offer back then. Hell, just about everybody wore a hat.

There were numerous manufacturers early in the 20th century that are all but lost to memory now, including that one in Binghamton that you cite, facade. One out here in Seattle, the J.T. Hardeman Hat Co., even had its own retail stores -- in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Spokane, and two in Seattle. The 1920s vintage (I think) building that housed its manufacturing plant still stands, at the corner of Aurora Avenue North and Republican Street, but the company itself is long gone.

 

[TomS]

I still feel that the hats made today, by the private labels, are every bit as good as the ones made during the last century. The ease in which we can communicate details, the quality materials being sourced, and the techniques being used by the artisan allow a product that easily rivals the hats of yesteryear.

Best,
Tom

 

[facade]

I still feel that the hats made today, by the private labels, are every bit as good as the ones made during the last century. The ease in which we can communicate details, the quality materials being sourced, and the techniques being used by the artisan allow a product that easily rivals the hats of yesteryear.

Best,
Tom

Great hats can be purchased today and there are no wrong answers here as this is all opinion. Each person will value things differently so each can have their own favorite.

While you can get a great hat today, for most of us, it can't be done locally. There is no option to go in and try hats on, handle the different felts and colors in a showroom straight out of a palace. That reason is sufficient for me to favor bygone decades.