Buying A Cowboy Hat 

Whether you call it a cowboy hat or a western hat there’s a lot to know about buying a hat before you slap down your hard-earned money.

Let’s start with the kind of material you would like your new cowboy hat made of. The two major categories are straw or felt. Within each of these categories there are many choices of material and also quality. So let’s start with straw cowboy hats. The most popular choice for tradional straw western hats is for them to be made of shantung. According to the dictionary shantung is:

Just like with Panama hats the fineness of the weave and the quality of the fabric to start with will determine the ultimate quality of the hat. All traditional cowboy hats made of shantung have a hardener sprayed on them to give them the stiffness required to stand up to the demands of real, working cowboys. Yes, there are still working cowboys out there. When you’re shopping for a shantung cowboy hat, look closely at the thickness of the hat and the fineness of the weave. The finer the weave the less hardener will be required to be sprayed on the hat. So if the hat looks like there’s more hardener than shantung don’t buy it unless you’re looking for a strictly costume or throw-away hat. The other type of material that’s very commonly used on less traditional, fashion western hats is toyo straw. This is a very lightweight natural fiber generally used in crushable straw western hats. A good example of this is the Scala ST11 cowboy hat.

Now let’s talk about felt cowboy hats. Again, there are two major categories of felt. There is wool felt and fur felt. Wool felt is the less expensive of the two and generally where hat novices start. As the name suggests it’s made entirely of wool excluding the sweatband and decorative hat band. Within the wool felt category you have crushable cowboy hats and stiff cowboy hats. The stiff cowboy hats have a stiffener applied just like the shantung mentioned above. The crushable wool cowboy hats are very popular with people not accustomed to wearing hats because they tend to fit better without any additional work required on the part of the hatter. It’s so soft it instantly takes the shape of your head. With the stiff cowboy hats it may take some work on the part of the hatter or the customer to break in the hat to the shape of their head.

Now on to fur felt cowboy hats. When you jump from wool felt to a fur felt you have instantly gone up in quality. When shopping for a fur felt cowboy hat, one of the first things you’ll notice is a bunch of X’s stamped on the sweatband. This is an indication of the quality of the hat but more on this a little later. Fur felt hats are made of a variety of different kinds of fur. You have wild hare and rabbit, farm raised hare and rabbit, beaver, kangaroo, bison, chinchilla and nutria. Of all these furs beaver tends to be the most popular among western hats. Just to muddy the waters a little more there are different qualities of fur depending on which part of the animal the fur came from. There are also “secret recipes” the different manufacturers use to mix the different kinds of fur in order to achieve a certain quality or price point.

Speaking of quality, let’s discuss the X’s you see stamped on the sweatband. The system of rating fur felt hats with X’s goes back decades and is meant as a quality indicator. The higher the number of X’s the better quality the hat. Some people will argue that it doesn’t mean anything today but that’s usually because they don’t understand the X rating system. The first thing to know is that you can’t compare the X rating from different brands. As an example, you can’t compare a 4X Stetson cowboy hat to a 4X Bailey cowboy hat. There is no industry standard for the X system so each company can rate their hats however they want. What the X is good for though is comparing hats within a particular brand. Again as an example, a 20X Stetson is better than a 4X Stetson but not as good as a 100X Stetson. I will tell you this though. If you see a 4X Stetson also stamped “Beaver” the amount of beaver fur in the hat is so minimal that it’s purely there for marketing purposes.