James’s. Lock & Co. had been commissioned by Edward Coke, the younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, who had designed a close‐fitting, low‐crowned hat to protect his gamekeepers’ heads while on horseback from low‐hanging branches. The keepers had previously worn top hats, which were easily knocked off and damaged. Lock & Co. then commissioned the Bowler brothers to produce the design. They responded with a distinctive hat with a hard shellac resin‐treated crown. When Coke arrived in London in December 1849 to collect his hat, he reportedly placed it on the floor and stamped hard on it twice to test its strength; the hat withstood this test and Coke paid 12 shillings for it. In accordance with Lock & Co.’s usual practice, the hat was called the “Coke” hat (pronounced “cook”) after the customer who had ordered it. This is most likely why the hat became known as the “Billy Coke” or “Billycock” hat in Norfolk.
This hard hat proved suitable for a number of occupations – street traders, cab drivers, fishmongers, shipyard stevedores, and construction workers. Others such as salesmen, insurance hacks, civil servants, and bank managers quickly adopted it to replace the upper‐class top hat and the lower‐class cloth cap. The bowler went on to be associated with businessmen in the City of London as part of their dress code. Beyond London, the bowler had several other lives.
It has been largely forgotten, but the bowler, rather than a Stetson or sombrero, was the most popular hat worn in the western United States. Perhaps Frederick Remington’s cowboy paintings and Hollywood western movies popularized the historical inaccuracy. Cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, and railroad workers preferred the bowler, and so did lawmen and outlaws, including Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, Black Bart, Billy the Kid, and the Wild West Show’s outlaw Marion Hedgepeth, commonly called “the Derby Kid.” They all wore the hat with its shellacked crown because it worked as head protection and did not blow off easily when horseback riding or sticking one’s head out the window of a speeding train or in any strong wind.26
Another region that took up an appreciation of the bowler hat is the Niger Delta of Nigeria. Men of this region use the hat along with a walking stick. Introduced by British colonials in the 1900s, these fashion accessories have become a staple part of the regional costume to indicate social status. Recently a “Bowler Hat Bash” has become part of Nigerian Independence Day celebrations.27
In Northern Ireland, the bowler became common in shipyards. Along with a pair of white gloves and a sash, the bowler hat represented the traditional clothing worn by Loyalist fraternities, such as the Independent Loyal Orange Institution, the Royal Black Preceptory, and the Apprentice Boys, when they marched.
Except in these Irish parades, the wearing of the bowler in Great Britain in the 1960s began declining. Central heating was being installed in new homes and in workplaces and hats became less necessary for warmth. Moreover, the rapid growth in private car ownership often made wearing a hat difficult. Coincidently, mass media influences, particularly in music, film, and television, worked against hats. Celebrities and star performers stopped wearing them. Traditional hats fell out of fashion and were replaced by baseball caps, beanie hats, skull caps, hoodies, and cheap umbrellas. Even at weddings, high society horse races, and church, hats for both men and women gave way. They largely died out during the 1970s. One factor that perhaps contributed most to the hat’s demise was its association with Captain Mainwaring, in the BBC television series Dad’s Army, in which as a banker wearing a bowler and as captain of the home guards he represented an outdated, conservative, and pompous comic character. Another likely cause was the TV comedy show Monty Python, in which John Cleese used the bowler in sketches such as his Ministry of Silly Walks. This did nothing for the bowler’s social image.28
In Bolivia, the importation of Borsalinos ended when World War II prevented commerce with Europe. Moreover, Italian wartime demands for shellac used in the production of both airplanes and small boats greatly reduced the material available for hats. In Bolivia, the local Borsalino‐style hat factory, Charcas & Glorieta in Sucre, continued to produce the hats, and a similar, knock‐off version was being made in La Paz in various colors, crown heights, and material quality in local workshops.29 Imports resumed after the war, and beginning in the 1950s, the Broadway House sold these Borsalinos, at a rate of three or four a day, at a price equivalent to $75 each, for over 30 years.
The Borsalino factory closed some time later, but much of the demand was met by Charcas & Glorieta in Sucre. This factory had been founded by Princess Clotilde Urioste de Argandona, a Bolivian philanthropist who received her title from Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century, when her husband served as ambassador to the Vatican. In Sucre, she built a castle surrounded by Venetian‐style canals, gardens, and a small zoo. She started the hat factory in 1929 to provide jobs for the people of the town. At some point, around 1950, management of the factory was handed to Italian immigrant Mario Nosiglia from Sagliano‐Micca in Biela, where the town’s nine hat factories had been reduced to one because of the decline of men wearing hats. He directed the 80 employees who used Bolivian, Uruguayan, and Argentine wool to make 35 different hat forms, some based on U.S. and European designs, and, of course, the Borsalino. Under his direction, the workers began producing 7,000 hats each month. The factory’s production continued to expand until 1986 when it reached 500,000 hats or unfinished felt hat casings. This production equaled about half of the Bolivian market and it supplied at least 2,000 hat makers in Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Chile, who bought casings and molded them into finished bombines that sold for $10 to $20 apiece. It was well known that during his presidency Victor Paz Estenssoro frequently commissioned Nosiglia to provide his hats.
Charcas & Glorieta in the 1980s relied on the same steam‐powered machines installed during construction of the factory. Spare parts and molds had to be made by hand because the factory that built the machinery no longer existed. Perhaps the old machinery explained the company’s inability to keep up with demand in Bolivia. In an effort to obtain new or replacement machinery, an executive went to Italy, but unfortunately died just before negotiating for the equipment. So, the company attempted to purchase the Italian hat company Panizza’s factory with a $2 million credit, $600,000 of it from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Manager Nosiglia expected the expansion and new machinery to double the factory’s output to one million felt hats per year while enabling it to make 60,000 rabbit‐fur hats. He said 20,000 felt hats would be exported to Italy for Panizza’s former clients. He also claimed the enlarged factory would benefit farmers, who would supply the fur of at least 50,000 rabbits a year and wool from 10,000 sheep, according to company plans. “The economic impact will be extraordinary,” Nosiglia declared. Charcas & Glorieta already made beside the derbies thousands of “J. R. Dallas” hats that sold for $15 apiece as well as traditional hats for nearly every region of Bolivia.
Representatives for Sucre’s Charcas & Glorieta in the late 1980s negotiated the purchase of the Panizza factory plant and machinery (primarily the front shop, which undertook the first phase of the production of felt). The Bolivian entrepreneurs Alfredo Gimenez and his son Miguel made a partial payment for the restoration of the machinery. Nevertheless, even though the senior Gimenez seems to have been appointed Governor of the Central Bank of Bolivia in 1989, he was not able to provide the necessary amount of foreign currency to pay for the machinery. Consequently, the machinery was never shipped. An Italian intermediary a few years later bought the equipment and probably sold it to one of the former Soviet republics.30
When the Nosiglia and Gimenez plans did not work out, the former decided
