The World's Finest Panama Hat | Hacker News Reader

The World's Finest Panama Hat

npr.org

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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.

"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)

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

Funny you should mention that. I almost wondered if the parent was using the term deliberately. It made the entire story feel as if it had been written in the US in the 1950s. I was reading it in the style of a 1950s detective story.

I agree, it have it a very old-timey feel. I felt like I was about to read about him being there to overthrow some kind of banana republic.

Similar here, I spent some time trying to find out of it was a quote from Graham Greene or some other author who wrote about the Caribbean or South America... no luck though.

For what it's worth, Whiskey Charlie was probably a young man in the 1950s. And the military is culturally stuck in the 50s. So it's not that far off.

or the J Peterman catalog...

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.

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

That's a queer claim to make.

i see wut you did there.

I don't understand. Could you be direct?

The GP means that you can misrepresent the word but it does not change the meaning.

Let’s leave that decision to those affected by the slur, shall we?

Yeah, anyone who has seen The Big Lebowski would know that it is not the preferred nomenclature.

I saw the Big Lebowski on deployment sow many times I can't begin to count. I don't remember the scene you refer to.

Obviously you're not a golfer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYOzUHnPJvU

I was unaware, thanks. Although I did think about the word choice... "Chinese? That's gender-neutral, not informative. Chinese man? too long. Chinaman. Dude, from China, with a little nostalgia. Nailed it.

> Cracker

Awww... I feel the love!

Damn crackers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_cracker

It was a good point to bring up, and I'm glad you did, but would have been a better post to also say what the preferred term is, especially as "a Chinese" is confusing to people.

I _believe_ "a Chinese man/woman/guy/programmer" is the most correct way to say it, using it as an adjective (at least that's how I get around it).

OP here. I ran into an interesting situation doing demographics for a college: there were 586 blacks and 587 African Americans: one white guy from South Africa worked the system. Needless to say, no one got kicked off a bus because their parents were born in Africa. They got kicked off a bus for being black.

Since then, it has been my, perhaps selective, observation that the trend is for groups to prefer we recognize the people for what they've been through. They're not homosexual, they're gay. They're not African American, they're black.

That said, in this case, I honestly hadn't considered the possibility that "chinaman" was offensive, but between "chinaman" and "chinese man", "chinaman" felt right in the story.

(sidestepping any politics and instead discussing grammar)

Anyone know why the use of demonyms as nouns is inconsistent? "American" is used as to denote one individual, while "Chinese" is always used as a collective noun.

A French...no (a Frenchman, OK).

An English... no (an Englishman, OK).

A Japanese... yes.

A German... yes.

An Italian... yes.

A Chinese... no (a Chineseman, no; Chinaman, also no).

It seems to be pretty random, like a lot of English grammar... "Chinaman" is singled-out as pejorative for historical reasons mostly restricted to the US. Other Europeans had different pejorative nouns for Chinese people.

Agreed. In the UK Chinaman is archaic, but I've never heard it used as a pejorative. Chink would be racist here.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

>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.

Eh, for a lot of those, the thing you are buying is the... immeasurable something you get from it being made by hand. Uniqueness. What someone like me might call flaws.

My Toyota van is gonna be way more reliable than a Maybach Landaulet. It can haul more, too. Hell, if I got a more expensive Toyota, say, one of the faster lexus LS models that is more in the shape of the Landaulet, it wouldn't even be much any slower, and the LS is, if not affordable, at least realistic for your average silicon valley tech nerd.

I'm not saying that a Lexus LS really compares to a Maybach Landaulet in the market or in people's minds; it doesn't. One is like $70K and the other is like one and a half million. But the strongest objective advantage the Maybach has is simple exclusivity; There are a lot of Toyotas on the road; a lot of the value in the Maybach is in the process... and the process that makes it rare.

Objectively, I would easily argue that the Maybach is worse. It's going to be vastly less reliable than that Lexus. and certainly, for telling time, your $10 drug store watch is vastly superior to your hand-built analog wrist-art piece.

And if you want to get fancy, even the cheapest cellphones these days come with time synced from GPS satellites. (GPS is fucking amazing. One of those things where the more you learn about how it works, the more amazed you will be that it works ever at all.)

So... yeah, I'm not saying there isn't value in having a hand-built art-piece; sometimes, there's a whole lot of value. And if you've got that much money, why do you really care what time it is, anyhow? But I am saying that you're going to have to search pretty hard to find an example where the hand-built example is objectively better at fulfilling it's ostensible purpose (e.g. transporting people and telling time) than something mass-produced by machines.

I'm having trouble thinking of many things where that is not the case. Computer chips are one obvious example, but what else?

I think the distinction your looking for is "crafted" vs "manufactured". What is interesting is that the linage of these devices include lots of "craft".

- Vacuum tubes

- Wire wraping

- Core rope memory and some magnetic core memory.

Where it gets even more interesting is when you NEED craft for advancement. The most entertaining case I can think of is this one: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/neil-armstrongs-spaces...

http://www.thecredits.org/2013/09/bras-in-space-the-incredib...

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAC43Ydrf8

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?

The website is nice but the phones are 10x the price of an iPhone and 30 times the price of a Moto-G 3rd gen.

That said it's nothing to do with the spec of the phone and everything to do with the look of the phone, everyone in their set knows that the phone costs 7 grand, they know that you know that they know etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snob_effect

I don't know how legit it is, but high end tires often advertise that there is craftsmanship involved in making them.

I don't know much about watch culture (I have a $10 Casio) but I heard someone say that a $1,000 watch is expensive, but a $30,000 watch is an investment. Not sure if people really pay attention to watches but Google "investing in a watch" and there's plenty of articles about it.

I have a weird feeling watch collecting/repairing will increase in popularity in the near future? Along with an increase in prices? These brands I mention below, except Orvis, can be bought on eBay for under a hundred dollars. Most of the time they just need a service, or a new stem?

Names like Benrus, Elgin, Orvis, Oris, Hellbros, and a buch of ETA movements, with obscure names, are great watches, and one day just might become more collectable than they are presently?

These mechanical watches were worn by the working man. They all had great movements. I repair watches, and I can't tell the difference in quality between Rolex movements and most Benrus Movements on the older models.

Once you have a basic set of tools, and a little bit of knowledge on these old watches; you really start to see the beauty/value of old mechanical watches. With me--it started out as a hobby, to maybe a career? In the near future I am coding two websites devoted to watchmaking. One will be just about watch repair, and watch information. The other will be my personal business website where I will sell and service watches. I wish I got interested in Horology when I was younger? The bug didn't hit me until 10 years ago, when I got my first IWC cal. 89 watch. The guy who sold it thought it was a Timex. He sold it to me for $5.00. Well I got it cleaned, and oiled, and has been on my wrist ever since. It's so old the letters on the dial are completely faded, so it doesn't even look like an expensive watch. I wear it in the worst parts of town. I am the only one who knows it's a extremely well designed/machined piece of watchmaking history.

So yes, I think vintage watches will go up in value. I hope not for awhile--because right now I can still get good deals on EBay. I just got a Omega Seamaster for a little over $100 dollars. When I get it running it will make a great watch for someone? A watch that will never be thrown away? A watch that can be handed down to a loved one?

Dude, I can hear your uptalking in your every other sentence. Questionmarks are for questions, not emphasis.

vintage watches, and hand-made hats, will go up in value simply because there are more people with more money than they can find things to spend it on. It's called Asset Price Inflation.

They do.

There is a huge divide between a $10 and a $1000 watch. One is a simple Quartz battery-run watch. But when you start talking about mechanical and automatic watches, your looking at incredibly intricate micro-scale engineering. (You may be able to say the same thing about intricately weaved hats, but I wouldn't know.)

You can get a decent mechanical watch below $500, but you're almost definitely looking at a Seiko.

I wouldn't bet on a watch as an investment, but if you spend $3,500 on a good quality Omega Speedmaster or $35,000 on a (low end) Philippe Patek, it's a solid bet it will retain its value over time. I wouldn't bet on it increasing in value better than a Vanguard index fund, but...

Source: I love researching watches and clocks (especially centuries-old clocks) and find mechanical movements to be engineering works of art. I don't personally own that $3500 Omega Speedmaster... Yet...

your looking at incredibly intricate micro-scale engineering

Making an LCD is no small engineering feat - it just happens to benefit from enormous economies of scale.

If you get really amazing micro-scale engineering, you can get a watch that is almost as accurate as a quartz watch, for a hell of a lot more money. At least with the hat, it is qualitatively better.

Qualitatively how? Does it keep the sun and rain off better than a ten dollar canvas bucket hat?

Root comment mentions smoother, lighter, more flexible. Lighter certainly seems like a desirable quality, I'm not wearing a hat to work out my neck muscles.

Smoother, lighter, and more flexible than a less dear Panama hat. The bucket is almost certainly lighter than both, if you're looking to relieve your neck from its tremendous burden.

ljw1001 was comparing watches by their ostensive purposes, telling time, but the hats by something else.

Exactly, better than other panama hats for the purpose for which it is used. And I wasn't as KC8ZKF states, comparing hats by one standard and watches by another. You can make a quartz watch that looks and feels exactly like a fine mechanical watch (excluding those that expose the insides, of course) AND is more accurate. You can't make a cheap panama hat that looks and feels exactly like a finely made panama hat because the craft is directly exposed.

You can get a decent self-winding mechanical watch for $150 from Swatch.

Beyond that, mechanical watches are like art or classic cars - you can "invest" in them, but they are more status symbol and one-upmanship than investment...

> You can get a decent self-winding mechanical watch for $150 from Swatch.

For a certain value of "decent"...

http://watchguy.co.uk/review-a-trip-inside-the-swatch-sistem...

I got a decent self-winding mechanical watch for about $30 from Seiko. Granted, I bought it used, but you really don't have to spend much at all unless you're really into watches.

I want something rare and unique, lets buy an off the shelf, mass produced iWatch for USD 17k.

Sometimes there is just no viable explanation for human behavior.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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