Welcome back to the Gentleman's Gazette. In today's video,
we'll discuss the surprisingly simple and easy process of reshaping a felt hat at home.
Long time viewers are sure to know that we're no stranger to classic hat content on the channel.
We've produced videos on how to select a hat, various classic hat styles, hat etiquette,
and more. You can find our full playlist on hats here. Today's video is the second of a two-parter
on hats. The first video covered seven tips on how to wear traditional hat styles with confidence.
So, if you've bested any self-consciousness about hat-wearing and are now a regular wearer
of classic hats as I am, you may occasionally find that one of the hats in your collection might look
better with a different shape to its crown. We have covered crown shapes before in our video
on the anatomy of men's hats, but here's a brief refresher. Of course, the crown is the part of
the hat that covers and conforms to the head. The teardrop crown shape also called the C-Crown looks
like a teardrop if you're considering the entirety of the hat or like a letter C if you're looking
primarily at the back portion of the crown. The center crease or center dent-style features one
central crease that runs down the middle of the crown typically at a depth of about 1 to 2 inches.
The diamond crown is a slightly less popular shape than the more commonly seen teardrop,
but it was a popular style for a time in the 1940s and it's a little bit wider than your typical
C-Crown shape. The telescope crown (also known as the flat top) is seen on everything from top hats
to gambler hats, straw boaters, and pork pies. This crown shape either features a totally flat
top of the crown or a slight lip that runs around the perimeter of the crown at a very small depth.
And finally, we have the open or round crown which simply refers to the natural shape of the crown
before it's shaped into a different style. Also, the crown can be left round for some styles
such as the bowler or derby hat. I think those engines outside are starting to pick up a little.
So, if you're feeling confident enough to take the plunge and reshape a hat,
here's the process of how to do it. We'll start with a list of necessary materials. First,
of course, you're going to need a hat. You'll want to use a felt hat preferably a soft or crushable
style. Crushable hats are designed to take a bit more wear than their stiff counterparts,
which can be lacquered or otherwise coated. As such, crushable hats are the easiest ones
to reshape at home. While you might be able to remove a minor imperfection in a stiff hat like
a Homburg and you could preserve the open crown in a bowler hat, we would strongly recommend that if
you need a stiff hat reshaped you consult a professional haberdasher or milliner.
Next up, you're going to need a source of steam. In addition to your hands, steam is the primary
tool you're going to use to reshape a hat. The heat and moisture will work their way into and
amongst the felted fibers, loosening them up and getting them ready for reshaping. Dedicated hat
steamers are used by manufacturers and garment care professionals, and they can be found online,
though they're generally pretty pricey. And while a standard garment steamer could work,
its steam output generally isn't going to be forceful or concentrated enough
to penetrate the fibers of a felted hat. As such, the easiest appliance to use in the home
is a stovetop tea kettle; not an electric model. Of course, kettles generally whistle,
so you'll probably want to put in some earplugs or be alone or isolated in your home, and if you're
in a small or not particularly well-soundproofed apartment building, be careful as well.
Fortunately, the tea kettle you see me using in today's video has lost its whistle completely
over years of use. So, it's actually ideal for this job. Next, you're going to need a source of
misted water. To introduce more moisture in areas where steam doesn't seem to be cutting it,
having a spray bottle can also be helpful. While a large one could work, it will again probably be
somewhat imprecise. Therefore, having a small fingertip model like this one will be best.
If your hat has a leather sweatband, you'll also want to have a paper towel or rag handy,
just so that the sweatband doesn't get saturated with water. Next, you'll need a round form of
some kind to open and shape the crown of the hat. Traditionally, hat blocks, which are also
known as hat forms or bashing blocks, were carved from wood by a craftsman known as a block shaper.
For a truly bespoke hat, a gentleman's head would be measured and a hat block created just for him
while this artisanal trade has faded somewhat over the past century, traditional hat blocks are still
available, not only in wood but also in materials like metal and plastic. Vintage hat blocks are
considered collectible by enthusiasts, and one advantage of a wooden hat block
is that it can be re-carved to suit a new head shape unlike plastic or metal blocks. Fortunately,
you don't actually need a dedicated hat block for this job at home; just something that's round
enough and tall enough to roughly approximate the shape of your head. A relatively round bowl on top
of a cylindrical object should probably be fine. You could use something like a plastic bowl over
a cookie jar or other household appliances, as I'm doing here. And if you can't find anything around
the house that fits these dimensions, you can, of course, just use your own head as the form.
If you do this, you'll probably want to cut up a plastic grocery bag to put on your head
as a moisture barrier. Yes, it does look a little silly. But after all, you are just in the comfort
of your own home. Finally here, for a hat that's really been mangled out of shape, you may want
to consider soaking the hat in a basin of water for a day or so before attempting the reshaping
process and you may need to weigh the hat down if necessary. Just be mindful that the hat doesn't
have a leather sweatband and use cold water to try to keep things relatively more colorfast,
especially when dealing with vintage hats. Soaking a hat in a water basin should really be considered
a last resort technique, and we wouldn't recommend it for most reshaping processes.
Okay, with materials on hand, let's get started. If your hat has a liner tipping inside of it,
you'll probably want to remove this before attempting reshaping so that the liner
doesn't stretch or tear in the process. This can typically be done fairly easily by flipping out
the sweatband and cutting the threads that hold the liner in place with scissors or a seam ripper.
Liners can be reinserted if you choose, but personally, I find them to be a bit of a nuisance.
So, I just leave them out of my hats after taking them out for reshaping.
So to get started, you'll obviously want to get your kettle on the boil.
While this is happening, you'll want to introduce some moisture to the hat
ideally using your fingertip sprayer. Get things good and saturated but not dripping wet.
Once your kettle is boiling and producing a steady stream of steam, you can take your damp hat
and put it in the pathway of the steam. Make sure to work the hat around fairly thoroughly,
getting both the outside and inside of the crown steamed up. Once the crown seems fairly malleable,
you can stretch it softly but firmly over your round form to open up the crown and get it back to
its default shape. Remember not to pull too hard here. If the crown hasn't opened up completely,
you can simply repeat the process of introducing some mist then some steam and then force to open
up the crown. Once the crown is open, you can start by putting a center crease in the hat.
Hit the crown with a little bit more water and steam and then you can use one finger to draw
a line over the center of the crown. Check to make sure that things are actually centered using the
small bow at the back of the sweatband found on many hats and just making sure that front to back
things are lined up. If this line is centered, you can then use a small amount of pressure
to make a center crease in the crown of the hat. Work slowly and carefully. You can start in the
middle of the crown and crease outward or start at one end. I often find that it's easiest to
start at the back of the crown and work my way up to the front. If you'd like your hat
to have a center dent-style, you're more or less finished. The only other thing you'll have to do
is make a pinch at the front of the crown to put two dimples in the front of the hat, then hit it
with a bit more water and steam, hang it, and you should be good to go with a center-dented
hat. We're going to demonstrate a teardrop or C-Crown shape today though,
so there are more steps involved. After using a bit more water and steam,
you're going to want to start flattening out the top of the crown. You can start at the back and,
again, work your way toward the front creating that teardrop shape. When viewing the hat with
the brim parallel to the floor, keep in mind that, traditionally, the back of the crown will have a
lower overall height than the front. Again, working gently and carefully, just shape the
hat with your hands into the overall teardrop shape, working with water and steam as needed.
There really isn't a better way to explain this, your hands should hopefully just develop a feel
for where they need to be as you go through the process. Once you're satisfied with how the top
edge of the crown looks, making sure that it's symmetrical side-to-side, then you can use either
your round form or your own head to introduce a bit of a bubble back into the center of the crown.
Then, again, hitting with water and steam every so often, make sure that the top edge of the crown
forms a bit of a lip relative to this bubble. The last stage here is to hand shape the front
of the crown into more of a defined triangular point again, making sure that you put in the two
creases at the front of the crown as well. Give one more hit of water and steam to finish
and that's the end of the reshaping process. Now just leave your hat undisturbed on a hook
for a few days, preferably one that has a large and rounded point so as not to leave a bump in
your hat. Here are a few other general pointers to consider when going through the reshaping process.
First of all, you can raise or lower the overall depth of the crown using the center
point as a guide. Remember that how much depth you want in a crown is partially determined by
how tall the crown is to begin with when it's open and should also be determined, in part,
by how the hat will look relative to your head shape when it's finished. For our video on how to
find the best hats relative to your face shape, you can go here. Oh my goodness! Get out of here.
For snap brim hat styles like fedoras and trilbies, it's important that you don't steam
the front of the brim in a downward position. It should be left up so that you can snap it
down when wearing it and snap it back up when not wearing it. Also, if you need to reshape the brim
of a hat somewhat, you can do this but make sure to use a delicate touch in addition to water and
steam. Also, it's important to store a hat on a hook when it's drying so that it doesn't fall
out of the proper shape. If you set a hat down on a table on its brim, the brim could flatten out
or curl up, otherwise just not in the shape it's supposed to be and if you store the hat
on the top of its crown, as you normally would store it when it was dry, this could
flatten out the crown somewhat, which would also look undesirable. Most of the tips we've gone
over today have applied more exclusively to felted hats; however, you can use these same techniques
to steam and reshape a straw hat, but you must be considerably more gentle. Use your hands to
lightly coax the straw into shape as if you're too rough the straw could tear. Each of the crown
styles we discussed today has its own level of difficulty when reshaping as well. The open crown
is fairly self-explanatory, of course, as all you really need to do is use the round form to open up
the crown of the hat. The center dent-style is the simplest, as we mentioned, followed by the
teardrop or C-Crown shape, which is really only slightly more difficult. The diamond crown is
a bit more difficult than this and will require more hand shaping, especially to make sure that
all of the sides of the diamond are roughly equal and that the hat is symmetrical front to back and
side-to-side, not counting the pinches at the front and the positioning of the brim. Finally,
a telescoping or flat top style can be especially difficult if you want to get that tight narrow lip
at the top of the crown. However, with time and patience it can be done. Finally here, in addition
to using these techniques to reshape a hat, you can also use them to some extent to resize a hat
while the hat is saturated with water and steam, you can use a tool called a hat stretcher,
which is available online, to increase the circumference of the crown, but only by so much.
These stretchers use tension so putting too much on the hat may damage the sweatband or indeed the
felt itself. This is why it's important overall to know your hat size when purchasing hats,
especially if you can't try them on so if you need to resize, it will only be slightly. Conversely,
making a hat smaller is a much tougher process. It involves a period of prolonged exposure to heat
using an oven. We really wouldn't recommend trying this process, unless you're extremely confident.
As a bit of a horror story, That's how I got the hat you're seeing here into such poor shape,
and even after copious attempts at reshaping, this is all the better I've been able to get it
so far. So, hopefully, using these methods you'll be confident and or curious enough to
attempt reshaping your felt hats at home. It may sound and seem difficult at first, but trust me,
it's actually a relatively simple process. I was actually somewhat shocked at how easy the process
was when I first attempted it and I was pleased with the results I got that first time. And,
of course, like anything else, it might just involve a bit of trial and error. If at first
you don't succeed, try, try again. In today's video, I'm wearing an outfit working in a brown
and blue color palette. Obviously, topped off by a hat. This hat is a vintage short-brimmed
trilby in a sort of mustard brown color. I think that the narrow brim works well with my face shape
and the color works well with my skin tone. The color of the hat also harmonizes well with
other elements in my outfit, including my vintage camel hair sport coat whose football buttons have
a bit of wear. I'm also wearing a French cuffed shirt featuring a light blue ground with thin
white stripes and plain blue trousers that are a bit brighter than your typical navy blue;
more along the lines of a royal blue. My shoes are brown brogued wingtip derbies, which curiously
feature no medallion on the toe. The rest of the elements in my wardrobe today are all from
Fort Belvedere; starting with my shadow striped socks in navy blue and royal blue to harmonize
with my trousers as well as my shirt. My two-tone silk knit tie is in shades of blue and brown and
my light blue Veronica persica boutonniere adds a bit of visual interest to my lapel.
My silk pocket square is in a color we're calling copper red and it features an art deco,
Egyptian scarab pattern in royal blue teal and yellow, as well as a blue contrast edge.
My belt is in a brown shade that harmonizes well with my shoes, and it features a simple
silver buckle. Finally, today my platinum-plated sterling silver eagle claw cufflinks feature blue
lapis lazuli as the stone to harmonize with my shirt, socks, and trousers, as well as with the
silver in my belt buckle. You can find all of the Fort Belvedere accessories I'm wearing here today,
including the socks, tie, boutonniere, pocket square,
and cufflinks in the Fort Belvedere shop here.
We'll start with the necessary list...
We would strongly recommend that if you want...
Traditionally, hat blocks also known as... Preferably one that has a dull and large point...
Finally here, these techniques in addition to being able to resize a hat...
I was kind of shocked, um... My shoes are brown wing...
My belt is in a brown shade that harmonizes well with my shoes and it features a simple...