An American Original

I'd been thinking about a straw homburg for next year and thought it time to re-acquaint myself with Paul's Hat Works. Founded in 1918 and occupying a small hatbox of a shop out on the Avenues in San Francisco, Paul's is one of those completely original places that should probably be famous but isn't known outside of a small circle.

Michael Harris, who became the current proprietor in 1980, is the third to own the business. A hatmaker's apprentice early in life, Harris hand blocks, hand stitches, and crafts Ecuadorean straw and beaver felt into some of the finest hats in the world using machinery from the 1930s. B. Brent Black, the leading American importer of hatting material from Ecuador, calls him one of only five or six craftsmen in the United States capable of high quality hand blocking of Montecristi hats.

That reference sold me on his straw hats, which start at $500 and go to the stratosphere (I asked the price of an exceptionally fine sample and was told "It's a car"). And then I got a look at the beaver felt fedoras.

Felt hats were fashionable in Europe from 1550 until 1850 when silk hats took over, and a beaver hat was so desireable that the European beaver was hunted to the brink of extinction. Beaver was held to make the best hats because, after a wetting, beaver holds its shape better than felt made from wool or other types of fur. Water off a beaver's back, so to speak. That matters in San Francisco, and for that matter most of the other cities in the Northern hemisphere.

There are very few true custom hatters remaining in the world today. The best known high end hatters in the world, such as London's James Lock, don't make custom hats any longer, but Harris does. He measures your head individually and takes that individuality into account when he shapes your hat, so you get a height and a brim that works for your head. His fedoras are made of "100% beaver, unlike that stuff they sell you elsewhere." Even the hat bands are made from pre-war material, which he buys up as the few remaining traditional hatmakers go out of business because it resists the elements better than anything made today. $1500 each and worth a special trip to San Francisco.