
The World's Finest Panama Hat - js2
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/08/340682706/hes-just-woven-the-worlds-finest-panama-hat-but-who-will-buy-it
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niels_olson
In 1999 I met an English professor on a Navy frigate. He had made friends with
a reservist of Chinese decent. When we arrived in Manta, Ecuador, there was a
transportation strike; the whole city smelled of tuna. We went to a Chinese
restaurant and the chinamen struck a deal: we would help load the
restauraunteur's pick-up with frozen shrimp from a warehouse in the mountains;
he would take us to Montecristi to buy some hats.

I sat in the back, with no seat (he had taken the seat out to haul more
shrimp). We drove up the mountain dirt roads for an hour to the warehouse. It
was guarded by men with automatic rifles. We loaded 20 sacks of frozen shrimp
and drove another hour, deeper, to Montecristi.

The villagers were quite happy to meet us, as no one was coming to visit due
to the strike in town. I bought three hats: a gorgeous open weave hat for my
wife, a fino for my brother, and a veri fino for myself. I had the villagers
block mine as a fedora, but it would take some time to get made. The man
brought it to me the next day, at the pier, having riden his bicycle all the
way from Montecristi. I paid $50 for that hat, including delivery. 25 strands
per inch, or 625 weaves per inch. Outside of Brent Black's shop in Honolulu, I
have never seen a finer hat.

Brent Black quoted me, sight-unseen, that hat would fetch in the ballpark of
$400 in his shop.

I still wear it now and again. I have sewn in inner and outer bands of 1.5"
black ribbon. The professor, Whiskey Charlie, bought himself a hat, as did the
chinaman. And we drove two hours back to town, with those slowly thawing
shrimp bouncing around with us.

Manta was the first place I saw a whale breach.

~~~
crimsonalucard
"Chinamen" is kind of racist. I, being chinese, am not personally offended,
nor do I really care, but "chinaman" is generally considered to not be a nice
word.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_\(term\))

I'm only bringing it up in case you are unaware, cracker.

~~~
an_ko
I think it would be good for the language if we try to "de-escalate" the usage
of neutral-looking words that are currently considered offensive. Carefully
re-introducing them when the tone is clearly not racist—like here—might be a
good way to do that.

"Chinaman" feels like an excellent renaturalisation target, given it is
borderline.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Any man with a resume has a history, just like a word. You can't change
history, but you can certainly falsify the resume.

~~~
stickfigure
That's a queer claim to make.

~~~
crimsonalucard
i see wut you did there.

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mr_luc
Oh, wow -- it's crazy to see an article on Hacker News about Pile (the village
that the weaver in the article is from). I have a house 4 minutes from Pile
and have some good friends from there.

I spent the past 7 years in those exact villages on the coast, including Pile:
El Aromo, Liguiqui, San Lorenzo, Las Piñas, El Abra, Santa Rosa, San Pedro 6,
and finally Pile (in order of their distance from Manta along the highway).

The article is correct that the finest Panama hats are not made in
Montecristi, but in Pile (although there were a good number of weavers in El
Aromo as well, more picked-over by the dealers).

One thing the article doesn't mention are the occasional abortive attempts to
collectivize, and to wrest some degree of control away from the dealers and
towards the hat producers. Pile, for instance, recently built a pretty little
hat museum, and tours of mostly European/US tourists are brought through from
time to time to take pictures and see where the hats are made.

But the gulf between the dealers and the weavers is enormous. Most weavers,
when they move upwards ... move out of weaving. For instance, the coastal
fishing economy is going through really hard times at the moment, but even so
a fisherman can make 2 or 3x what a weaver does. Even someone doing machete
work will probably net more per month than a weaver. Which is why most of the
weavers in terms of volume are probably women; little old ladies with sunken
chests from leaning on the rounded stone that holds the work in place.

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tinco
In 2007, he was already known as the best weaver alive, he made $20 per month
according to this documentary:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZ4DoIdSwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZ4DoIdSwA)

He does not own a panama hat, he could never afford to keep something he works
on for months.

Not making a point or anything, just interesting to see such a big wealth
divide between the maker and the buyer.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That makes me wonder why something like the Internet doesn't change this guy's
financial situation. So you could, with a camera phone and something like an
international version of Stripe, have this guy finish a hat, upload a picture
of it to the web, sell it, and then hand it off to a person he pays to take it
into town and to ship it.

~~~
omegant
This is the site of ecuatorian women cooperative. As you may imagine the site
is not very up to date nor useful, but it has an email and telephone number.
It's so unupdated that seems genuine to me. I think I'll try it.
[http://www.unioncañari.com/index.php/home](http://www.unioncañari.com/index.php/home)

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idoh
I had the privilege of trying out a $15,000 Panama hat. There is a qualitative
difference between a $100 Panama hat and a $15,000 dollar one, but still,
paying $15,000 or more for a hat is quite a luxury acquisition.

A finer weave makes them a lot smoother, lighter, and more flexible, which is
useful in really hot and humid climates. The guy in the shop said that the
daily progress for such a hat is adding about a centimeter to the hat each
day.

~~~
noir_lord
I think it's like watches, once you go above $100 dollars you are out of "I
want a practical accessory" and into "I want to own something rare and/or
unique".

I guess if you have the money it looks like a good deal, I can't imagine
spending $15,000 on a hat but then I can't imagine spending it on much of
anything (a car perhaps).

~~~
js2
It's interesting that there are still products (hats, watches, cars, ...) for
which the finest examples are made by craftsmen with enormous skill, and not
by machine.

~~~
mikeash
I'm having trouble thinking of many things where that is _not_ the case.
Computer chips are one obvious example, but what else?

~~~
leephillips
Cellphones, laptops, ball-bearings, tires, ....

~~~
erichurkman
There's still a luxury brand that hand-builds cell phones: Vertu, out of
England. Though obviously the components are still made by machine (chips,
etc).

[http://www.vertu.com/us/en/home](http://www.vertu.com/us/en/home)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAC43Ydrf8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAC43Ydrf8)

~~~
leephillips
They're pretty, in a way. But are they the finest examples of a cellphone?
That was the question I was replying to. Are they actually better than an
iPhone, or my HTC?

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tricolon
Brent Black, the hat dealer mentioned in the article, has a problem that is
itching for a solution:

> Manually counting the rows of weave is a tedious task.

> If there are any inventors out there, the ideal scanner would be about the
> size of the handheld scanners I’ve seen used at the checkout register in
> some stores. The scanner would have a one inch by one inch reading window
> that would be placed against the surface of the hat. The user would push a
> button or pull a “trigger” and the scanner would scan the rows of weave both
> horizontally and vertically. The LED readout would report that the hat is
> 23-27-621.

> Call me when you have my scanner ready.

[http://www.brentblack.com/pages/panamahatgrades2.html](http://www.brentblack.com/pages/panamahatgrades2.html)

~~~
oxymoron
Shouldn't be that hard, right? Pocket microscopes already exists and as far as
computer vision algorithms go, it's not a very complex problem.

~~~
brianbreslin
could the optics in an iphone or decent android phone scan/capture high enough
resolution to count the strands?

------
crimsonalucard
You kids may not be old enough to remember, but back in the day ICs were hand
carved by artisans. We'd sit for days with a microscope and a nano blade
etching the traces bit by bit into the wafer.

------
leephillips
The author, Roff Smith, seems to be a talented guy. Not only is this good to
read, the photographs, by Smith, are excellent.

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nicwolff
My father wrote essentially this article for Connoisseur Magazine in 1983; you
can see the cover, with a zoomable photo of the hat that was made for him then
in the hinterlands of Ecuador, here:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B004MKRY30](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B004MKRY30)

The crown of that hat is about 6.5 inches across. Can you count the weaves in
one inch? The NPR article claims 4000 weaves per square inch, or about 63 in
each direction - I think Dad's has at least that!

I'll try to dig up the text of Dad's article, it was pretty interesting.

