VINTAGE O’FARRELL HAT Ladies Fedora Style BEAVER light brown small size 20.5
VINTAGE O’FARRELL HAT Ladies Fedora Style BEAVER light brown small size 20.5 circumference. Hat is preowned was custom made for woman named Eva. Please look at photos for details. There are a few spots that might be of needing attention, or just the way beaver is made or wears. I contacted the company to find out more details, its either 70% or 100% beaver. There are no specific markings to identify content. Article on the O’Farrell Hat Company – from online source. They know which celebrities have the biggest heads – or the most irregular. Durango’s world famous O’Farrell Hatmakers won’t divulge these secrets, although they know every nook and cranny in Bruce Willis’ noggin. He wears a cowboy hat called “The Kid, ” a style preference shared by Mel Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and Dustin Hoffman. O’Farrell’s small Durango workshop made the hats that graced the heads of Matt Damon and co-stars in publicity shoots for All The Pretty Horses. They had to wear beat-up-looking hats in the film. The small O’Farrell team has made hats for two former presidents, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. Company owners Letitia and Art Glenn think they have a shot at covering the cranium of President-elect George W. Bush at his inauguration. “A big part of our customer base is still the working cowboy, ” Letitia says. We have many a letter from a grateful cowboy happy that he doesn’t have to worry about his hat blowing off. A cowboy will spend his last dollar on a good hat. But the most remarkable thing about O’Farrell hats isn’t who wears them – it’s how they’re made. What is arguably the world’s best cowboy hat requires European engineering a couple of hundred years old, tricks of a trade passed down for generations in French salons and fastdisappearing from the planet. “We make a map of the head, ” Letitia says. The custom hat starts with something that looks more like an instrument of torture than a tool of luxury. The 150-year-old Parisian-made conformateur that is placed on a customer’s head resembles the innards of a piano curved into the shape of a top hat. As the company’s two original antiques grew rickety, engineers were hired to try to replicate the device, which is no longer manufactured. Several failed tries, teams of engineers, tens of thousands of dollars and years later, the Glenns finally have equally accurate backups. A conformateur’s long wooden or metal “keys” conform to the shape of the skull, measuring its girth at every longitude and punching pinprick holes into a small slip of paper stored at the top of the crown. The conformateur reproduces on this paper, on a smaller scale, the outline of the head’s oval, or whatever shape it is. O’Farrell staffers gently refer to a head’s bumps and dents as nuances. They map them and then cut a cedar block memorializing the exact shape of one’s dome along the perimeter where the hat will rest. “My head is quite crooked, ” Letitia says unabashedly. Her husband doesn’t flinch – even manages a grin – when she calls his head very large and very irregular. His hat-resistant head is what first led the Glenns to O’Farrell’s. Years ago, Letitia bought Art a hat for his birthday from Durango’s master milliner, Kevin Farrell. When the couple neared retirement from careers in graphic arts, marketing, broadcasting and publishing, when it was time to leave Denver and Houston behind for a small town, they came to Durango, long a favorite vacation spot. About that time, Kevin Farrell, a gifted hatmaker, was losing his business. Kevin is an artist. It was our idea to beg him to come back into the business, Letitia says. He did, and the collaboration lasted about four years. Then there were problems that the Glenns won’t discuss, and Farrell left. Farrell now has his own hat store in Santa Fe. And hard-to-fit Art Glenn has the Durango store, a talented team of a dozen people, and his very own flattering hat style, called the Cortez. It was so named as a tribute to his ancestors, who settled in the Montezuma Valley a century ago. He grew up there himself. A good Stetson costs as much, Letitia says. Our competitors think big machines make good hats. We know better, she says. The hat begins life as a beaver. Its fur makes the most prized felt, although O’Farrell’s also will use premium blends with European wild hare. The fur is dipped over and over in a succession of chemical baths, steamed and hand-massaged until its fibers crawl closely together into a big cone of felt reminiscent of a dunce cap. At the O’Farrell hatmakers’ studio in Durango, the Glenns’ daughter, 30-yearold Taaron Glenn, manages production. The crew takes a floppy felt cone and begins the long and highly repetitive process of steaming, shaping, massaging, sanding, ironing and pressing that will turn felt into a muscular, svelte and durable head garment. The work demands strength, dexterity and patience. It has no economies of scale. But it also has its rewards. “It’s a lot of fun to make the best hat in the world, ” Taaron says. This item is in the category “Clothing, Shoes & Accessories\Specialty\Vintage\Vintage Accessories\Women’s Hats”. The seller is “machompath” and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Estonia, Australia, Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovenia, Japan, China, Sweden, Korea, South, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Africa, Thailand, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Bahamas, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Croatia, Republic of, Malaysia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, Bangladesh, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, French Guiana, Guernsey, Gibraltar, Guadeloupe, Iceland, Jersey, Jordan, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Sri Lanka, Luxembourg, Monaco, Macau, Martinique, Maldives, Nicaragua, Oman, Peru, Pakistan, Paraguay, Reunion, Vietnam, Uruguay.
- Brand: O’Farrell
- Occasion: Casual
- Size: 20.5 inch circumference
- Decade: Unknown
- Color: Brown
- Style: Fedora
- Original/Reproduction: Original
- Fur Type: Beaver
- Material: Beaver
- MPN: 10001
- Look: Tailored
- Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Tags: beaver, brown, fedora, ladies, light, o'farrell, size, small, style, vintage