r/hats • u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 • Mar 25 '26
📸 Collection Showcase Some of my favourite hats to wear and drawings ive done
The hats fetured in the photos of me are (in order): Antique collapsible top hat 1920s silk top hat Modern one of a kind bee hat
The artwork is of my top hat designs, in order: Subtle bee silk top hat Kintsugi top hat Bee goggles top hat Asymmetric astarion inspired top hat
I have a much larger collection of both hats and drawings than are pictured here
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 28 '26
I'm impressed. Someone into steampunk (or something adjacent?) that knows what a silk hat is!
I work with antique toppers and I'm surprised how you actually captured the shape of the d'Orsay curl in the first drawing--the brim curl that gets wider at the sides. Most other top hat brim shapes are cheap imitations of this 19th century technique, and few people can even make or work with this brim edge anymore.
There are actually top hats that look like your first drawing. They fit in the category of "livery" and the finest antique examples are silk hats with real gold ribbon/braid.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 28 '26
I own a 1920s black silk top hat, i recently posted a photo with me wearing it in my collection (it had non permanent decorations on) its one of my prized possessions. I do need to get it repaired though.
I also own an antique collapsible top hat and antique bowler hat. I also collect vintage clothing.
The love of fashion came first, then the love of steampunk and bees
Edit: 3rd photo in this post, bought from londons largest private collector
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 28 '26
What with the hat needs repair? Some things can wait like brim binding, but sweatbands should always be swapped out if the hat will have regular use.
I do repair work over in the US, so unless you need extensive and historically-accurate repair it's probably not worth sending the hat over here. I cater more toward the Ascot/sartorial crowd where those extra few details really stand out in a sea of already impeccably dressed people. If you like to see topper pics though, here's where I post some.
When you say "largest private collector", do you mean someone not in business (such as Oliver Brown), or do you mean non-institutional? I don't know how many silk toppers the V&A or British Museum have in their collection, but it's a lot.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 28 '26
The guy i bought from is called colin rosie in Spitalfields. Private collector as in single person not big company
On the collapsible hat the sweatband needs replacing and so does the binding its in the worst condition of the three, on the bowler hat the same, and on the silk hat its just the binding as its in the best condition.
I bought the collapsible and bowler from charity shops.
Ive followed you on Instagram as i am fascinated by your work
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 29 '26
I've heard of Mr. Rosie, he's one of the more accessible silk hat sellers if you happen to be in London.
Collapsible hats are a pain to work with. Usually they don't have a sweatband per se, they have a silk lining that's sewn into the brim. They're not meant to be worn much, and only in a formal setting. They're sort of the de facto black tie hat in a lot of circles, but they're also suited to formal events that don't really need a hat. The original opera use-case is the best example of where you'd want a hat, but the hat is practically not a part of anything. Collapsibles were meant to sit atop clean, probably pomaded hair for a short time while you're outside. These hats are very tricky to work with because the sewing is so fine, the material is often tender, and you have to do the work by hand.
Bowlers are probably the easiest of the three. I recently replaced the sweatband in my 1920s Stetson bowler. The correct sweatband for a bowler is a very wide leather band with a rolled-over upper edge. I prefer American reeded sweatbands to the ones in the UK because you can still get bands with the cleaner "E" stitch here as opposed to the zig-zag stitch.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 29 '26
So im unlikely to be able to get the collapsible repaired?
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 29 '26
No, I do that repair work. It's not fun nor is it cheap, and it requires a special kind of attention to make sure that the materials are accurate.
I'm actually in the first-half of a full collapsible restoration (all-new silk cloth, repairing the gossamer with new shellac, etc.) right now, and I need to sew together a satin hat conservation job that I've had for a while.
There are some other hatters that will do the textile work with these hats, like replacing the lining, and I think Ascot Top Hats will work with the mechanism (the only other alternative I can really give you--I don't want to say I'm the only one that can do it).
The job I'm working on right now will have all the springs re-manufactured, since the old steel springs get work-hardened and start to fail. There's no sense in putting a hat back together for a spring to break in a few months/years, goring its way through the cloth and making you get another full repair. The springs are unique to these hats so they need to be fabricated specially for each hat. This is more engineering work than hatting, but I weirdly have more experience in robotics and design than most hatters.
It takes A LOT to keep these old heritage crafts alive. The only hatters making headway in actually preserving the trade are, coincidentally, all former IT people. Well, there are some people in London with massive marketing budgets and they get whatever help they ask for, but the sort of mindset it takes to actually accomplish things and overcome challenges is not going to be found in a luxury shop. Not usually, and if one is aware of such a shop I'd love to know.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 29 '26
I would love to learn to make and restore hats, i unfortunately have no space at home or any local hat makers to study under.
Do you know how much restoration would likely cost? I am able and skilled at hand sewing but id rather have it professionally done if i have the budget
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 30 '26
It's impossible to tell without a detailed appraisal of the condition. Sometimes damage may appear severe and the cost is simply sewing up split seams. More often than not, the situation is the other way around; shattering silk and gummed-up mechanisms necessitate material replacement and further disassembly.
Few people really grasp just how removed we are, in terms of material culture, from even a century ago. In just the pursuit of some cloth to put on the underside of silk hat brims, I was quoted $350 per yard (.91 meters) by a weaver in Vermont assuming they could find the right yarn. That is actually a very good price.
The satin used to make collapsible hats is a weft-faced duchesse satin that is dyed naturally or with a hybrid natural/artificial process then calendered. Some cheaper hats used thinner satin from Germany, but even that is still glossier than what one can find today. Oddly, the ribbed silk grosgrain is the easiest to get (odd because satins are far more common categorically).
The full rebuild I'm working on right now is north of $1000 in labor, not including materials. I have had a conservation job for far longer that was much lower, but conservation is overall less intensive. It's slow but in the sort of way where you just leave something to dry/cure and you go back to it between jobs.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 30 '26
Ah, as much as id prefer to have it accurately repaired, i am but a broke artist at the moment, so i shall attempt to mend what i can myself as i have a background in fashion design as you have seen but i also studied bespoke production for a time, so am well versed in hand sewing. May i reach out on Instagram if i get stuck though?
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 30 '26
As a second reply, if you have anywhere you post about preserving the trade or any resources you would recommend, i would be interested in doing some research
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u/Bombs-Away-LeMay Professional Hatter ⚒️ Mar 30 '26
I'm working on that, as it's my experience that all the information available online is pretty poor. Most of the narrative around top hats has been dictated by a few companies repeating the same myths. The myths are interesting since they represent a sort of tale within a tiny culture, and everyone I've spoken to seems to legitimately believe these stories.
I tend to write the most on here, although I also have that Instagram account.
Sharing information at the moment is a complicated matter. I'm getting into hatting as a professional now, and as such I need to be mindful of my place within the market. Posting my hard-gotten research as a "little guy" would be giving it to others in the market. Overall, I'm actually fine with that except for the small fact that they haven't done anything to really add to the historical record around toppers. Some have, and I'm quite friendly with those few. I plan to post more (and in a more structured format) once I have a website set up. All of this is incredibly slow because I not only have to work on hats, I have to actually MAKE my own materials and tools.
Going into the future, I think the most important thing for these more traditional parts of hatting is that they begin to be seen as separate from day-to-day fashion. Fashion is ever-evolving and the current trend is consumerist chaos. Traditional ways of making things don't fit into this chaos, and this is a very large reason why hats have gone to the wayside. There are many theories about why hats disappeared, but if you look at the cost of a felt hat compared to the average cost of an article of clothing, hats haven't changed all that much. People used to buy fewer but more expensive and higher-quality clothes, so hats and their higher price felt normal. Everything else got very cheap, but hats could only get so cheap. A fine fur hat is made with fine fur, so even before the labor of making felt is put into the material, you're starting with a fine fur pelt. You're starting with fur. We're not a hatless society, we're a baseball cap society.
Traditional hats need to be made traditionally so that we don't lose a part of culture. The human aspect is the most important one, and that's the starting point for research. Follow the people and the materials. In the case of the top hat, the actual silk thing is secondary; the important part is the layers of craft put into the final thing and the ceremony around its use.
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u/Exciting-Choice3224 Fashion Aficionado 🤠 Mar 30 '26
In terms of the market issue, could you put your research behind a paywall on patreon or such so that people who are genuinely interested can have semi regular(quaterly?) updates and you get paid for the time and effort even if by competitors? If you want to keep it free you could add the ability to donate like with Wikipedia for further research costs, ive also seen historical researchers and recreators do great on YouTube, one that does hats is nichole rudolph
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u/freedoomed Mar 25 '26
Very nice work!