Hat Terminology: Sweat, Reed, Bash, Bandline and the Words Hat Lovers Use

Every hobby has its own language, and hats have more than most. Read a hat forum for ten minutes and you will meet sweats, reeds, bandlines, bashes and silverbellies without a word of explanation. Here is a plain guide to the terms hat lovers and hat makers use, with the emphasis on the inside of the hat, which is the part we make.

The inside of the hat

Sweatband, or just the sweat: the leather band sewn inside the base of the crown that sits against the forehead. It gives the hat its fit, holds the crown in shape and keeps sweat out of the felt. Reed: the thin synthetic wire sewn into one edge of the sweatband. A reeded sweat holds a firm, even line and bells the leather slightly away from the head; an unreeded sweat is stitched straight to the felt. Tape: the fabric strip stitched along the reeded edge that carries the reed and takes the needle when the band is sewn in. Ferrule: the small metal tube that joins the two ends of the reed when a band is cut to size. Bow: the little woven bow sewn over the seam of the sweatband at the back. Liner, or lining: the satin that finishes the inside of the crown above the sweatband. Size label: the small woven label inside the crown that gives the hat size.

The crown

Crown: the part of the hat that covers the head. Open crown: a crown left rounded and uncreased, the way it comes off the block, for the wearer to shape. Bash: the crease put into a crown by hand; also the verb, to bash a hat. Centre dent, teardrop, diamond and C-crown are named bashes. Pinch: the two dents pressed into the front of the crown where the fingers grip it. Taper: the angle of the crown's sides; a tapered crown narrows toward the top, a straight-sided crown does not. Block: the wooden form a hat is shaped on; to block a hat is to shape it on that form.

The brim and the band

Brim: the part that shades the face. Brim break, or bandline: the line where the crown meets the brim. Snap brim: a brim that turns down at the front and up at the back. Edge finishes are named too: a raw edge is cut and left plain, a bound edge has ribbon sewn around it, an overwelt is folded up over itself and stitched, an underwelt is folded under. Ribbon, or hat band: the grosgrain ribbon or leather strip around the outside of the crown just above the brim, usually with a bow on the left side. This is the band people mean when they say hat band; the one inside is the sweatband.

Felt and straw

Felt: the body of a dress or western hat, made from fur (beaver, rabbit, hare) or wool. Fur felt is lighter, finer and more expensive than wool felt. Silverbelly: a pale, warm grey-beige felt colour that is the classic western hat shade. Straw: panama, Milan, shantung and raffia are the common weaves for summer hats. Body, or hood: the unshaped felt cone a hat is blocked from.

Sizes and fit

Hat size, in the US system, is the head circumference in inches divided by pi, so a 22 3/4 inch head is a size 7 1/4. Europe uses centimetres, so the same head is a 58. Long oval: a head shape that is longer front to back than a standard oval, and a hat blocked to suit it. Break in: the first weeks of wear, when a leather sweat softens and moulds to the head. Hat stretcher: the wooden tool that eases a tight crown a fraction of a size.

Why the words matter

When you order a replacement sweat, a liner or a bow, the right word gets you the right part first time. Our leather sweatbands are reeded, in regular and full grain sheepskin, sold by the piece or sewn to size, our satin hat liners tuck behind the sweat and fit most crowns, and ferrules, bows and woven size labels finish the interior. If you are ready to put the vocabulary to work, our guide to sewing a leather sweatband by hand goes through the whole job. Ten thousand orders and more than 2,500 reviews at 4.9 stars on Etsy: that is the track record behind every one of these parts when we sell it. Not every sweatband is leather, which is the point of our comparison of a leather sweatband vs a fabric sweatband.

What makes a fedora a fedora

Ask a hat lover and you will get three answers and an argument. The honest answer is that a fedora is defined by a handful of features that go together. The crown is soft felt, four to five inches tall at the front, creased by hand with a centre dent and usually two front pinches that give the teardrop shape. Crucially it is meant to be shaped and reshaped: a hat sold open crown becomes a fedora when the wearer bashes it.

The brim is the second defining feature: wide enough to shade the face, usually two and a half inches or more on a classic hat, soft enough to be worn snapped down at the front and up at the back. A fedora brim moves, which is why old photographs show the same hat worn a dozen different ways. A grosgrain ribbon around the base of the crown with a flat bow on the left is the traditional trim, and its width dates the hat: wide in the 1940s, narrow in the 1960s.

The boundaries are where it gets useful. A stiff crown that cannot be re-bashed is a homburg or a derby. A crown under four inches is drifting toward a trilby or a pork pie. A narrow brim fixed in one position is a trilby, not a fedora. A brim with a stiff pencil curl belongs to the homburg.

Fedora, homburg, trilby, pork pie

These four are different hats with different crowns, and each interior has its own habits. The liner that fills a fedora crown is too tall for a pork pie; the sweatband that suits a soft trilby is not what a stiff homburg wants.

The fedora is the most forgiving to line: a 4.75 inch liner sits in the crown with no trimming, and the band is a standard reeded leather one cut to the crown and joined with one ferrule. Black for a dark felt, chestnut for a brown one. A homburg has a stiffer, taller crown with a single centre dent and a curled, bound brim, and it wants a band with a neat edge. A trilby runs shorter in the crown, around four to four and a half inches, so the liner usually needs trimming. A pork pie is shortest of all, three to three and a half inches, and a standard liner must be folded or re-gathered to sit right.

Bashing a crown, and protecting the inside while you do it

An open crown is a hat sold with the crown left round and unshaped, the way it comes off the block, so the wearer or the shop can put in the bash that suits them. A factory-shaped hat has a set crease expected to stay; an open crown invites you to make your own. Both can be re-bashed, and a good fur felt will take a new shape many times over its life.

The classic creases: the centre dent is a single crease running front to back, the oldest and plainest. The teardrop adds two side dents pinched toward the front so the top reads like a drop of water from above, and it is the standard fedora crease of the last hundred years. The diamond is a teardrop squared off at the front. The C-crown is a centre dent with the crown pushed forward and the front dents opened so the crease reads as a letter C. Western felts have their own family: the cattleman with its three ridges, the pinch front, the brick and the gus with its sloping front. Names vary by region and by who is telling you; the shapes do not.

Work over steam from a kettle or a steamer, never over boiling water you could put your hand into. Hold the crown in the steam for a few seconds until the felt goes warm and soft, then set it on your fist or a block and press the shape in with your fingers, one dent at a time. Steam again if the felt cools before the crease is where you want it. When the shape is right, let the hat dry on its own, crown up, for an hour before wearing it. Go slowly: a light steam and two or three passes beat one hard, wet soaking, which leaves water marks on a good felt and shrinks a cheap one.

Take the liner out first. Steam goes through felt, and whatever is inside the crown gets it too. A satin liner left in while you bash gets damp, presses its gathered seam into the wet felt at the tip, and can come out water marked. Lifting a tucked liner takes seconds; put it back when the felt is dry. If the hat has a glued liner that will not come out, keep the steam short and let everything dry thoroughly before the hat goes back on a head.

Fur felt and wool felt

Two hats can look the same on the shelf and be different animals in the hand. Both are felts, meaning the fibres are matted together with heat, moisture and pressure rather than woven. Fur fibres, from rabbit, hare or beaver underfur, have tiny barbs that lock into each other, so fur felt can be thin, dense and strong at once. Wool fibres are smoother and lock less tightly, so wool felt has to be thicker to be as stiff, and it is held in shape with more sizing. That single fact explains most of the difference.

A fur felt fedora is light and springs back when you squeeze the crown. It can be steamed and reshaped again and again, which is why old fur felts are worth restoring. A wool felt of the same style is heavier, holds its shape with stiffener rather than with the felt itself, and goes soft and lumpy if it is steamed too often or caught in heavy rain. Wool felt also pills, the little fuzz balls that appear where the hat rubs.

Brim edges and what they tell you

Look along the brim of any felt hat and the edge tells you what kind of hat it is, roughly when it was made, and how much care went into it.

A raw edge is the felt cut clean and left as it is, sometimes with a single line of stitching a quarter inch in to stop it stretching. It is the lightest and most casual finish, the one on most modern fedoras and western hats, and it shows the quality of the felt more than any other because there is nothing to hide behind. A raw edge on good fur felt stays crisp for decades; on cheap wool felt it goes soft and wavy in a season. It is also the only edge that can be trimmed narrower by a hatter without refinishing.

A bound edge has grosgrain ribbon folded over the brim edge and sewn through, usually matching the hat band. It protects the felt and stiffens the edge so a wide brim holds its line, and it is the finish on dress fedoras from the 1930s onward and on most homburgs. It wears at the ribbon first, fraying at the front where the brim is handled.

A welt is the felt folded back on itself and stitched, ending in a small rolled lip rather than a cut. Folded up over the top it is an overwelt, the finish on many western hats and on 1920s fedoras; folded under it is an underwelt. Welts sit flatter and heavier than a raw edge and look finished without ribbon. The Cavanagh edge, on a few pre-war American hats, was a welt felted into the brim so no stitches showed at all, a process no maker uses today and one of the things collectors look for.

Why hats have liners at all

The sweatband is obvious: it is what touches your head. The liner is the part people wonder about, because it does not touch the forehead, it is not glued down, and plenty of cheaper hats do without one.

The felt inside a crown is rough, and it picks up hair oil, product and dust through every wear. A liner takes all of that instead of the felt, and a liner can be wiped or swapped in five minutes while a stained crown cannot. On a good fur felt or straw, the liner is what keeps the inside looking new after years. It also covers the pale, unfinished side of the felt and the raw stitching where the sweatband was sewn in, so the inside of the hat matches the outside.

And it carries the name. The old term for the printed version is a tip liner, or just the tip, because the maker mark was stamped on the flat top of the crown. Hatters have fitted them since the nineteenth century, and a lined hat has read as a finished hat ever since. That is why a shop putting its own name inside a hat is doing something with a very long history behind it.