You may remember Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, or Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal; perhaps Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind or Peter O’Toole in The Last Emperor. Gregory Peck may spring to mind in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Sean Connery, on numerous occasions, wearing a superfino as the ultimate symbol of old-fashioned poise. They say Al Capone, Ernest Hemmingway, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, and Teddy Roosevelt wore them religiously. The Panama Hat, Ecuador’s unspoken claim to fame, is still a respected fashion item, sported by those of fame and fortune: Madonna, Mick Jagger, Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles, Francis Ford Coppola, Arnold Schwarzenegger… the list goes on.
There are stories like one of a man in Pile who makes just one hat a year that goes for US$25,000 on the international market
The weave on Panama hats can be so superfino (super-fine) it makes straw look and feel like cotton. The process to make one, which can take up to eight months of patient negotiations with the sun and the moon, seems uncanny in today’s world. With the market flooded by Chinese mass-produced phonies, it’s been some 30 years of Panama-hat connoisseurs predicting the end of the tradition. How close are we to witnessing the end of the traditionally confectioned Panama? We went to Montecristi to find out.
Weaving hats for life
In 1894, Ecuadorian president Eloy Alfaro gifted Cuban independence leader José Martí a 40 grade, extra fine “Jipijapa” hat (its name before everyone misconstrued it as a made-in-Panama specialty). Over 100 years later, Jhonny Chávez traveled to Havana representing Ecuador, invited by the Ciudad Alfaro Civic Center, with a replica of that very hat. People could not believe it was handmade out of straw. Chavez made his first knot when he was just 10, and although still young, at 25 years old, he’s convinced he’ll be weaving hats for the rest of his life.
Even before people earned a living in this field, people wove hats. Debts were actually measured in hats. To buy food, send the kids to school, purchase stylish clothes for festivities, people traded hats. In 1999, during Ecuador’s economic crisis, Jhonny’s mother was about to travel to the United States to work there and send money home. But by selling hats, the family avoided the misadventure. Today, she works with Jhonny, and his grandmother, who lives 35 minutes from Montecristi in Las Pampas, providing the paja toquilla straw needed to weave.
In Montecristi, ageless techniques are employed to create the Panama Hat.
About 20 percent of hats exported from Ecuador are made in the Montecristi area, especially in the countryside, in places like Pacoche, El Aromo, Pile or Las Pampas. Many weavers are older and, as years go by, fewer people dedicate themselves to the trade. Johnny is one of the few young weavers. Through hat making, Jhonny has discovered a sense purpose and a link to his land. For as long as he lives, he says he will remain faithful to an artisanal lifestyle. His latest challenge is to create an exact replica of the hat Theodore Roosevelt flaunted in front of cameras at the Panama Canal, a hat that marked the beginning of this accessory’s fame, labeled from then on as the “Panama Hat”, but which ironically was and is still made in Ecuador.
Paja toquilla is one of the most important commodity items to be produced throughout Ecuador’s history. With it, one of the country’s only manufactured goods for export was created—the “Panama” hat—which, since colonial times, became a crucial means of economic stability for landowners, communes, towns and cities, and even helped finance Eloy Alfaro’s liberal revolution. Its production techniques predate the arrival of the Spaniards and the development of the fabric with which the famous hat is made is world-renowned. In this photograph, courtesy of The Ministry of Culture’s Historical Archive, fifteen weavers “of different ages and both sexes, develop their crafts in Montecristi”, in 1912.
