The Object
A single fedora left on a hotel shelf in Portofino or Antibes tells you more than the label sewn inside it. It came from one town in Piedmont, and for the better part of a century it set the line of a man's silhouette along the whole northern rim of the sea. Giuseppe Borsalino opened his workshop in Alessandria on 4 April 1857. He had learned the trade in France, in the hat rooms of Paris, and he came home to make felt the way the French made it, only slower and closer to right.
What leaves the factory has never been quick. A felt Borsalino passes through more than fifty separate operations and takes roughly seven weeks. Fur is beaten and shrunk, pulled over wooden blocks, steamed and pressed and finished by people who each do one thing and hand it on. By 1888 the town was turning out two thousand five hundred hats a day. On the eve of the First World War the figure reached about two million a year, and more than two and a half thousand people in Alessandria drew their wages from the brim.
The coast took to it because the hat did two things at once. It kept a hard southern sun off a face, and it flattered the face it shaded. That is a rarer combination than it sounds. In 1900 the house carried off the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition Universelle, and the name travelled with the men who could afford to spend a summer beside the water. A Borsalino was not costume. It was the quiet proof that you had thought about the light.
Then the screen finished the work the tailors had begun. Bogart wears one in the last scene of Casablanca, the brim tipped down against rain that never really falls in Morocco, and after that the shape needed no explaining. It had become a piece of shorthand for a certain kind of composure, worn low, said little.
A good hat is not bought for a season. It is bought for the twenty years it will shade you, and by the end it remembers every one of them.
The factory is smaller now, the daily count a fraction of what it was, and there is a museum in Alessandria where a couple of thousand of the old blocks and hats sit behind glass. None of that has retired the object. We still notice it, on the right head, in the right light along the front. The linen creases by noon and the espadrille frays inside a fortnight. The felt holds its shape, and quietly keeps the count.
