Sun-Phobic Writer’s Perfect $180 Panama Hat Prompts Envy, Jokes
Philip Boroff
Paul Goguen/Bloomberg
Bloomberg reporter Philip Boroff in his wide-brimmed Panama hat. The hats can cost as much as $5,000.
Bloomberg reporter Philip Boroff in his wide-brimmed Panama hat. The hats can cost as much as $5,000. Photographer: Paul Goguen/Bloomberg
Suzanne Newman
Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Suzanne Newman of Suzanne Couture Millinery. Newman sells women's hats for as much as $2,500.
Suzanne Newman of Suzanne Couture Millinery. Newman sells women's hats for as much as $2,500. Photographer: Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Marc Williamson
Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
JJ Hat Center manager Marc Williamson with a display of Panama hats in New York. Williamson said most men favor hats with small brims.
JJ Hat Center manager Marc Williamson with a display of Panama hats in New York. Williamson said most men favor hats with small brims. Photographer: Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Peter Bartholomous
Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Peter Bartholomous with a Panama hat in Worth & Worth Hats in New York. Bartholomous calls Panamas "super handsome.''
Peter Bartholomous with a Panama hat in Worth & Worth Hats in New York. Bartholomous calls Panamas "super handsome.'' Photographer: Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Orlando Palacios
Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Hatter Orlando Palacios makes a Panama hat at Worth & Worth Hats in New York. The shop custom-fits hats, and dates back to 1922.
Hatter Orlando Palacios makes a Panama hat at Worth & Worth Hats in New York. The shop custom-fits hats, and dates back to 1922. Photographer: Philip Boroff/Bloomberg
Peter Bartholomaus stood in the sixth-floor showroom of New York’s Worth & Worth Hats, explaining his predilection for lightweight Panama straw hats.
“I wore baseball caps, and as I got older I wanted finer things,” said the 26-year-old staffer at the National Dance Institute, a non-profit that teaches dance to public school students. “It helps keep the sun off you and they’re super- handsome.”
Panamas may strike some as relics of yesteryear, tailor- made for men who are pretentious or affected. Talk to dermatologists about the perils of sun exposure and the limits of sunscreen protection and another image forms: Panamas as practical headwear for minimizing tanning, which, sadly, dermatologists have concluded is unhealthy.
“The mechanics of tanning require DNA damage in the skin,” David Fisher, head of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a telephone interview. “A tan that has no risk of causing cancer appears to be a scientific impossibility.”
Frequent applications of sunscreen help prevent sunburn, he said, but there are unanswered questions about its ability to protect against melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer.
There were about 69,000 new melanoma cases in the U.S. in 2009, according to the National Cancer Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health. And half of Americans who live to 65 will have non-melanoma skin cancer at least once. Most cases are preventable. While sunscreen does protect against non-melanoma skin cancers, a hat can help.
Misnomer
Panamas aren’t made in Panama. Hand-woven in Ecuador, they got their name because they were sold in Panama since at least the 19th century. Also enhancing their identity was a 1906 photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt wearing what appears to be a Panama, posing with a steam shovel at the excavation of the Panama Canal.
Orlando Palacios, the lean Nicaragua-born designer who owns Worth & Worth, twice a year visits Ecuador to buy the woven straw from local artisans. Back on 57th Street, he and his staff use steam machines and blocks representing head sizes to mold and shape hats, adding lining and exterior bands.
Temperament
“Some hats, they form in your hand like soft clay,” Palacios said. “Others are like an animal. All have their own temperament.”
The tighter the weave, the more expensive the Panama. To a first-timer on a budget, he recommends the “New Hampton,” a fedora with a 2 ¼-inch brim that sells for $155. It’s handsome and soft to the touch.
But it’s like sandpaper next to a $750 Montecristi, with straw from the coastal Montecristi section of Ecuador. And Worth & Worth recently sold two aged Montecristis for $5,000 each. One was to the actor James Spader, according to Palacios, while the other went to an undisclosed oilman from the Middle East.
“The first thing he said was, ‘I want to see your best straw hat,’” Brandon Franklin, a Worth & Worth salesman, recalled of the oilman.
I asked to see the store’s biggest straw hat. Although I happily owned one with a 3-1/2 inch brim, bought from the sun- protection-clothing outlet Coolibar, I envied women their brims as wide as 9 inches. Why, I wondered, does fashion relegate men to smallish hats, or worse, baseball caps that leave the neck and ears exposed, unless perhaps you wear them backward. Yet guys have higher rates of melanoma than women and are less likely to take steps to protect themselves from the sun.
Huge Headwear
Palacios showed me an unfinished Panama in his workroom with an audacious 4-1/2 inch brim. He measured my head, and after a half-hour of ironing, steaming, sewing, it was done. The brim was not only ample but wavy, as if designed by Frank Gehry. The tab: $180.
Back at the office, my colleagues masked their envy with derision.
“You need runway clearance to wear that hat!” said one hatless person with leathery skin.
I had to admit it: the brim was so aerodynamic the hat was flying off my head with the slightest wind. I loved it, but was my wide-brimmed Panama an Edsel of hats?
Grape Picker’s Hat
I took it to Suzanne Newman, a premier women’s hatter, at Suzanne Couture Millinery off Madison Avenue.
“It’s fine, if you’re in the country picking grapes,” she said. “But if you’re in the city, it’s a little feminine, a little eccentric.”
Alarmed, I headed to JJ Hat Center, a hat mecca two blocks from the Empire State Building. Manager Marc Williamson insisted I’d found my perfect Panama.
“It works for you,” he said of my huge headwear. “Buying a hat is an individual thing. I’m not a believer that there’s a standard for a type of guy.”
(With assistance from Laura Speyer. Philip Boroff is a reporter for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Philip Boroff in New York at pboroff@bloomberg.net.
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