Choosing a Summer Hat That Lasts
Choosing a Summer Hat: Panama, Boater, Cowboy Hat or Linen Cap:
A winter hat only has to keep heat in, which is easy. A summer hat has the harder job. It must throw real shade while letting air move through it, hold its shape in heat that softens lesser materials, and survive being stuffed into luggage, dropped on pub tables and worn through the odd shower. That is why summer hats are still made the way they always were, from woven straw and woven flax, materials that have never been improved on for the purpose.
The differences between the styles are not cosmetic. Each one is a different answer to the same problem, and knowing what each is made from tells you almost everything about how it will serve you.
The Panama: the finest straw in the world
The first thing to know about the Panama is that it has never been made in Panama. It is woven in Ecuador from the leaves of the toquilla palm, split into fine strands and worked by hand into a continuous crown and brim. The name stuck because the hats reached the wider world through Panama, shading the men who dug the canal, and when Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one at the canal works in 1906 the misnomer was fixed for good.
The weave is what you are paying for. Hold a Panama up to the light and you can read its quality in the rings of the crown: the finer and more even the weave, the lighter and more flexible the hat, and the more hours of skilled handwork went into it. A good Panama weighs next to nothing, breathes along every strand, and springs back to shape after a day in the sun. Our Carapaz Panama takes the classic fedora silhouette, pinched crown and banded, which is the shape most people picture when they hear the word.
If one hat has to cover holidays, weddings, race days and long afternoons in the garden, this is it.
Panama style hats: the same idea, worked harder
A hand woven toquilla hat deserves a certain amount of respect, and there are places you should not have to give a hat any respect at all. The beach, the festival field, the back of a car. For those, the Panama style hat exists: the same shape and the same shade, machine woven in a robust straw at a price that lets you treat it as a working hat rather than a kept one.
The trade is straightforward. You give up the featherweight feel and the fineness of the weave, and in return you get a hat you can roll into a bag, sit on by accident and rescue without a pang. Plenty of people run both, the true Panama for best and the Panama style for everything else, and there is no argument with that arrangement.
The straw boater: architecture you can wear
The boater is built on a different principle entirely. Where a Panama flexes, a boater holds. It is made from sennit, a flat plaited straw braid, sewn round and round into a stiff flat crown and dead level brim, so the finished hat has edges you could set a square against. That crispness is the whole appeal. No soft hat can do what a boater does, which is to sit on the head like a piece of drawing rather than a piece of cloth.
For a few decades either side of 1900 the boater was simply what men wore in summer, on the river, at the seaside, in town. It survives today at regattas, on cricket fields and at summer weddings, where it remains the most quietly theatrical thing a man can put on his head.
It is also, now, a rare thing. Hand blocked boater making sits on the Heritage Crafts Red List of endangered crafts in Britain, its blocks and specialist machinery scattered and its makers few. We are involved in the effort to bring authentic British boater production back, a story we tell elsewhere on this site, and every boater worn keeps a little of that trade alive.
The cowboy hat: maximum shade
Strip away the mythology and the cowboy hat is a piece of equipment: the widest practical brim a hat can carry, shading the face, the ears and the back of the neck at once, with a tall crown that keeps an insulating pocket of air over the scalp. It was engineered for people who work outdoors from first light to last, and no other style matches it for sheer coverage.
In a British summer that engineering finds new work. A straw cowboy hat breathes well, shrugs off a festival weekend, and announces itself from fifty yards, which some wearers count as a feature and the rest of us have learned to admire. If your summer involves more field than pavement, this is the tool for the job.
The linen cap: for those who do not wear brims
Not everyone gets on with a brimmed hat, and the answer for summer is not to go bareheaded but to change cloth. Flax, the plant linen is spun from, has a hollow fibre that pulls moisture away from the skin and dries almost as fast as it wets, which is why linen has been the hot weather cloth for several thousand years. A linen flat cap does in July exactly what a wool one does in January.
Ours are cut from Irish linen woven by Baird McNutt in County Antrim, a mill with over 220 years of linen weaving behind it on the Kellswater River. And a cap holds one advantage no brimmed hat can answer: it folds into a jacket pocket, comes back out an hour later, and looks none the worse for it.
Fit: the part most people get wrong
Whatever the style, fit decides whether the hat gets worn or hangs on a hook. In warm weather the margins narrow. A hat that is slightly tight becomes a torment by mid afternoon, and one that is slightly loose ends up in a hedge on the first clifftop.
Measure around your head just above the ears and eyebrows, where the sweatband will actually sit, using a soft tape or a piece of string against a ruler. Then trust the number over your instinct. We carry one of the widest size ranges available online, 53cm to 65cm, XS to XXXL, so an accurate measurement will almost always find its match. One rule matters more in summer than any other: if you fall between sizes in a straw hat, go up.
Care: how a straw hat reaches its tenth summer
Straw fails in only a few predictable ways, all avoidable. Heat is the main enemy, so never leave a straw hat in a parked car, where trapped heat bakes the natural moisture out of the fibres and leaves them brittle. Pick the hat up by the brim, not by pinching the crown front, since the pinch is exactly where repeated handling cracks the weave. If it gets caught in a shower, no harm done: lie it flat to dry naturally, and keep it away from radiators. That is the whole regime. Followed loosely, it will carry a good hat through many summers.
Where to start
Panama Collection
https://gambleandgunn.com/product-category/mens-hats/panama-hats-for-men/
Linen Collection
https://gambleandgunn.com/?s=linen&post_type=product
Cowboy Collection
https://gambleandgunn.com/?s=cowboy&post_type=product
Boater Hats : our Vintage and new collection
https://gambleandgunn.com/product-category/mens-hats/boater-hats-for-men/