Let it go to your head

As supple as an Olympic gymnast and as uncrushable as the bulldog spirit, the Panama hat has long been a staple of the British gentleman’s summer attire, says Harry Pearson

- Harry Pearson

THE Panama hat is the symbol of elegant British summer living, synonymous with Pimm’s and strawberries, blades feathering, the rattle of batting collapses and the ripple of sympathetic applause at Wimbledon as a plucky British player bows out in the early rounds. Sported by the art historian abroad and the detective on a Nile cruise, it is also the hat a man wears when day-dreaming of driving an open-topped roadster along the Corniche with Grace Kelly in the passenger seat. Although the trilby suggests pipe tobacco and fly-fishing in the autumn rain, the Panama carries the whiff of Cuban cigars, white smoke rising before a silhouette of ancient ruins against a dimming orange sun. It is both practical and fantastical. It has panache. It also has the wrong name.

‘The first thing to know about Panama hats is that they don’t come from Panama,’ explains hat maker Mavi Tzaig. Who knew that the name of Britain’s most popular summer headgear is a geographical misnomer? Just as French horns and Capri pants originated in Germany, so the Panama, in reality, comes from Ecuador.

Mrs Tzaig, along with her Ecuadorean mother, Jenny Frohlich, runs The Panama Hat Company, the UK’s largest importer and maker of Panama hats. ‘When the Conquistadors arrived in Ecuador, the indigenous people wore hats made from the fibres of a palmlike plant (Carludovica palmata),’ Mrs Tzaig continues. ‘The hats were brimless and looked like the tocado that were then fashionable among Spanish nobility, so the Spaniards called the plant paja toquilla (hat straw).’

It’s the special Ecuadorian straw that lifts Panama hats above the competition. ‘The straw has incredible flexibility,’ notes Mrs Tzaig. ‘It’s wonderful to work with. Hat makers will tell you that