SCHA SEAGRASS HATS FOR MY LITERATURE HOMIES

Images via Mohawk General Store

It’s summer, the season for lightweight hats and crotch talc, so cop one of these Chicago Short “D” Seagrass Hats from SCHA (available in black and ecru) before the next obligatory backyard cookout. Position yourself next to the beer cooler and explain to would-be drinkers that your hat was handmade in Germany, then marvel as they disappear from your side and reappear next to the grill, suddenly speaking in hushed tones, while glancing back at you and your uber cool hat. The moral to this impromptu fable is that you should be careful how you employ your headgear. Now you know. Circling back to the actual subject of this post (#thatsafirst amirite?), I think I may have been sleeping on the value of a straw hat. Wool is not a summer fabric, despite my most valiant efforts to the contrary. Straw is an impressively versatile agricultural byproduct. You can use it to make paper, bedding, and biofuels. You can even make a kickass cat’s house out of it. Straw hats have been around since the Middle Ages, so by the power of the argumentum ad antiquitatem, straw hats are fabulous hats. Think of all the amazing shit that came out of the Middle Ages: the Crusades, the Black Death, the windmill. If the Middle Ages hadn’t happened, where would fantasy writers get all their ideas? Without the windmill, at what would the heroically mentally ill Don Quixote have tilted? These are important questions and I for one am glad that we don’t have to reckon with the reality of their answers. I bet Sancho Panza would rock the fuck out of one of these hats. Shout to Sancho Panza, by the way. You know I gotta show some love to my literature homies: Sancho Panza, Ishmael, that little kid from Where the Wild Things Are. That’s my mans and ‘em -RB