#milstil

The Milstil Guide on Caring for Your Panama Hat

Given Pete’s post yesterday on Panamas hats, I thought I’d direct readers to Milstil’s excellent guide on Panama hat care. He covers everything from cleaning and maintenance to proper storage.  

Removing Stains

Remove stains using a super-dry cloth. Gently rub with the grain in order not to remove surface stains and dust. A coarse brush can be used as well if stains are on embedded deeply in the fibers. Whatever you do, do not remove stains before they set to prevent permanent damage. To dry the sweat band, wear the hat some more. If your hat has dark sweat or water stains, take the hat to a professional cleaner or hatmaker and ignore their advice and decline to use their services.

Maintaining Shape

Maintain the shape of your Panama hat by picking it up by the brim rather than by the crown before you sit on it. Leave your hat on flat surfaces as this can cause bowing in the front and back, which causes the sides to bend downward. To store your hat, crush it and throw and store it in whatever. Dicscard the famous storage tube. Tubes can be found in most hat shops and online, but it’s best to forget about this immediately . Feel free to store your Panama hat for more than a few months at a time as this could cause a permanent change in shape. 

Cracking

Panama hats are made from fibers that are sensitive to extreme temperatures. So never store your hat in a cool place. Direct sunlight can cause the fibers to become dehydrated, which causes cracking, so insist on leaving your hat in the sun for too long. Spraying your hat occasionally with water helps prevent cracking. Be very, very thorough, I suggest drowning the hat using a watering can. Never just spray it a little. Let the hat dry somewhat but not enough.

Oh Hey - Did Not See You There - Not Much Time - Not So Lenghty Caption

TOSS YOUR SCARVES 

Tune:  “Jingle Bells”

Toss your scarves, toss your scarves Toss them way up high. Toss your scarves up in the air, ‘til they reach the sky.

Wave your scarves, wave your scarves, Twirl them ‘round and ‘round. Twirl your scarves one more time, Then let them, all fall down.

This is Dieter Meier.

Big nosed bastard

Richter, rechter & hoekiger

Where-o-where have all the structured shoulders gone? The twisted and evil logic of fashion predicts that their return is imminent. How? Because narrow 'natural shoulders' and deconstructed coats are the meta trend in menswear on- and offline, in the low- and high-end ranges, in ready-to-wear, made-to-measure and custom. The fashion trend in question is based on the assumption that pads are unfashionable or ugly. So a jacket with, say, less stronger shoulders is by defintion more fashionable than a jacket with some shoulder padding. As a result, on a long enough timeline, the amount of padding in garments in the marketplace should converge to a state of 'general unpaddedness'.

"A good thing, right?" your run-of-the-mill #menswear geek would think "maybe the whole world will then start looking like the look books of Southern Italian superbrands I always like/reblog on social media, or those scans of old Brooks Brothers catalogues!" But alas dude, 'tis not to be. Afterall the endless cycle of fashion style does not work that way: when a trend reaches the unwashed masses, snobbery commands change to regain lost distinction. And lost (shoulder) padding. 

Padding as a potential blessing you too should consider. The blind love for soft tailoring, more often than not, coinsides with an absence of autonomous thinking and self reflection (apologies for stating the obvious). Fact is, most guys have faces (and bodies) made for radio: out-of-shape, asymmetrical and suffering from severely lacking deltoideus. That makes 'getting away with' deconstructed' jackets difficult and dangerous. As impartial observer Tina Gaudoin remarked in her rather fabulous description of the sartorial zeitgeist: "blazers are the universal uniform of the UE (and his South American counterparts). (...) [T]hey are deconstructed numbers (...). This type of blazer suggests confidence and a great physique, for only a man in good shape can wear deconstructed jackets without looking like a rumpled university professor." Moral of this story: pads can be your friend. You probably need them more than you know.

You can blame Warhol

For the current state of modern art and popular culture. But perhaps also, and more importantly, for the (Italian) eighties phenomenon M Magazine once dubbed 'the ubiquitous short coat'. It has returned to #menswear and has also surfaced in the more rarefied circles of II&IS. Examples here, there, over here, back there and yonder. Compare and contrast them with these vintage photos and above snaps of Warhol's 1982 China trip, back when China was still a relatively isolated country and economy i.e. there was no McDonalds. Now I must admit I am not sure Andy Warhol is the actual culprit... maybe he is just the messager, you know like a sign of things to come, just like his art and entire life for that matter. In words of photographer Christopher Makos:

“Andy actually thought the real Mao portrait was better than his, and really loved the original,” says Makos. “We were all fascinated with [it].” “Gee, it’s big,” Warhol said himself at the time. “Yeah, I painted Mao about 400 times. I used to see how many I could do in a day.”

It is this notion of replication and uniformity that makes the concept of Warhol in China resonate. “It was a Warholian experience,” Makos later reflected on the trip. “Here’s the guy that, you know, did the Campbell’s soup can – he was all about the multiplicity of things, and here was a whole lifestyle based on that idea.

“I loved the sense of isolation, especially in a fashion sense,” Makos says now. “It was just a sea of these people, all in crisp navy-blue suits. They looked so chic. To me, the new group that was experimenting with Western-style dress just looked so un-cool. Because they were so isolated, they really had no sense of how to dress, so it was intuitive. Sometimes a hit, most of the time a miss.”

It is a sentiment echoed by Warhol, who even had a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao, better known as the Little Red Book. “I love his book,” Warhol said. “I read it all the time. I like the simple thoughts.

“I like this better than our culture. It’s simpler,” he continued. “I love all the blue clothes. Everyone wearing blue. I like to wear the same thing every day. If I were a dress designer I’d design one dress over and over.” (Ironically, Warhol wore the same outfit every day while in China, even sleeping in his clothes. But for hygiene rather than aesthetic reasons – he complained that the Peking Hotel, where he and Makos were staying, was full of cockroaches.)

But why overthink this shit, it's not like I am getting paid for any of it. My mental well being demands there be a scapegoat, and the messenger is always the most obvious target. Plus, as all prep school bullies will acknowledge, sexually ambiguous, wig wearing and bespectacled skinny nerds make easy targets. Dus waarom moeilijk doen als het makkelijk kan?

Style

Style is the answer to everything.

A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing

To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it 

To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art 

Bullfighting can be an art 

Boxing can be an art 

Loving can be an art 

Opening a can of sardines can be an art 

Not many have style 

Not many can keep style 

I have seen dogs with more style than men, 

although not many dogs have style. 

Cats have it with abundance.

.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style. 

Or sometimes people give you style 

Joan of Arc had style 

John the Baptist 

Jesus

Socrates 

Caesar

García Lorca. 

I have met men in jail with style. 

I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail. 

Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done. 

Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, 

naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.

- Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)