I’ve been wearing leather hats for years, both flat and wide-brimmed. The hats were good because he could just pack them in bags while he was traveling and not worry about them keeping their shape. However, my leather brimmed hats were quite thick and stiff. To maintain the shape of the brim, manufacturers would sew wire around the perimeter of the brim. This worked fine until my hat brim fell off. He would then spend a lot of time bending it to reshape it. And I had to forget to pack one of these in anything other than a hatbox (hard to find these days except at antique stores). They did not travel well.
Australia’s Barmah Hats Squashy line is now available. They’re inland style, meaning they’re essentially cowboy hats, but with brims that don’t curve up like American hats. Barmah Hats claims that I can fold these 2½ wide brimmed hats into bags, where they still manage to hold their shape. Each one even comes with its own cloth bag, as if daring the owner to try the procedure. So I did. I have two hats: the 1022CH and the 1026BR. The 1026BR is a dark leather wide brim hat, visually similar to a soft dark leather hat I bought in the 1990’s. How do they compare? First, the 1026BR is 20% lighter, eight ounces instead of ten. (Is there any justification for a heavy hat?) And, of course, it crushes. I rolled it up as instructed and took it on a trip to Florida. Leather hats aren’t usually great fashion choices in the Sunshine State, but Tampa was in the ’70s, so it wasn’t hard. The 1026BR also has two vents, which helped keep me cool. It squashed pretty well, although it did have a crease in the crown for a few hours.
The 1022CH is also a dark brown brim hat, but it has a distressed finish that gives it a scruffy look. The strangest thing about this is that it is slightly smaller than the 1026BR, even though the labels on both hats say “Large”. I can’t figure this out. The 1022CH is too big for a medium, and the 1026BR is definitely not extra large. A word to the wise: try on hats before you buy. Happily, the hat seems to be responding to a stretching regimen better than others I’ve had. It may be because the inner sweatband is made of a stretchy material rather than a tight, inflexible fabric. Barmah Hats does not recommend that you store leather hats rolled up for a long time, as they will soon adapt to new ways you place them.
Aside from the size hassle, I highly recommend these leather hats. Its design seems quite evolved to me. Both are better thought-out than the fifteen-year-old counterpart mentioned above, which itself was an advance over its hippie-loving, flexible 1960s ancestor. They are also comfortable to wear. Because they are so flexible, I can wear them while driving, propped up against the headrest. I could never handle this position with any other wide brimmed leather hat.
