The Hat Comes Back
For most of recorded history, leaving the house bare-headed was like leaving without shoes. Then the mid-twentieth century happened — cars, casualness, a famously hatless generation of leaders — and the hat collapsed from universal to eccentric within thirty years. The trade's survivors are therefore something rare: houses that kept a complete craft alive through its extinction event, and are now watching the customers come back.
Rome kept the atelier. Antica Manifattura Cappelli, working since 1936, blocks hats the pre-war way — wooden forms, steam, felt and straw shaped by hand — producing everything from Borsalino-spirited fedoras to theatrical commissions in a workshop that doubles as a museum of its own tools. Roman tailoring's soft glamour was always finished at the hairline, and this is where the finishing survives; a made-to-measure hat, blocked to your head, is the difference between wearing a hat and being dressed by one.
London kept the institution. Bates has hatted St James's since the turn of the twentieth century — panamas in summer, felts in winter, flat caps and deerstalkers year-round — from premises steeped in the gentleman's-quarter ecosystem of shirtmakers and bootmakers around it. A Bates panama, rolled correctly for travel, remains one of the last unambiguous signals that its wearer knows things.
And Manchester kept the factory. Failsworth Hats has manufactured since 1903 in the north's old hatting country, producing wool caps, tweeds, and wax cottons at honest prices — the industrial end of the craft, without which the artisanal end has no trade to stand on. Failsworth is why a proper English cap is still an everyday purchase rather than a relic.
The revival is real: the flat cap came back through television, the fedora through vintage culture, the panama through summer itself. The three houses' advice compresses to one rule — fit is everything, so buy where heads are measured. The bare-headed century was the anomaly. The hat was the tradition, and it kept the shops to prove it.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Antica Manifattura Cappelli Rome / Prati / Online
Rome’s oldest hat workshop — the Cirri family’s 1936 laboratorio, revived by Patrizia Fabri; the only hatter honored as a Historical Shop of Rome, blocking on original wooden forms in Via degli Scipioni. store page → · open in the atlas → - Bates London, UK
Jermyn Street hatters since 1898 — trilbies and panamas from London’s gentleman quarter Now housed within Hilditch & Key at 73 Jermyn Street. store page → · open in the atlas → - Failsworth Hats Manchester, UK
A Manchester hatmaker tracing to an 1875 acquisition of the Maypole Hat Works, incorporated as the New Failsworth Hat Manufacturing Company in 1903; it made military headgear in WWII and produced Stetson-licensed hats from the late 1940s, and now trades as Failsworth 1903. store page → · open in the atlas →