wanted to sell the plant, but instead closed it. Nosiglia, rather than lead an idle life, was involved in opening two new hat factories in Sucre, “La Sucre” and “Chuquisaca.” These closed after a few years, and a new factory with different owners opened in 1997, Sombreros Sucre Museo y Fábrica. The factory with about 100 workers produced some 2,000 hats a day and the company won international awards for their hats in 1999, 2000, and 2001. The factory included a one‐room museum displaying hat styles from around the country. This factory has now closed.31
Nevertheless, the derby remains essential headgear in La Paz for Cholas. Worldwide, the Borsalino’s unmistakable shape had retained its iconic status. In 1970, the Borsalino gave its name to a box‐office hit, Borsalino, that starred Jean‐Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon as two French gangsters. A sequel followed in 1974, Borsalino and Co. The two films relaunched the Borsalino after what had been a fallow period for hat wearing, on the international fashion scene and in films. John Belushi wore one in The Blues Brothers and pop star Michael Jackson often wore a fedora matched with a trench coat just like Bogart.
The relationship between Borsalino and the cinema is so strong that it regularly is featured in exhibitions and shows. One example was the recent exhibition Cinema Wears a Hat, held in the Triennale di Milano. This trip through the history of cinema and fashion highlighted how the Italian hat is deeply connected with international films. Memorably, the evil henchman Oddjob in the James Bond film Goldfinger wielded a bowler as a lethal weapon. Batman’s best‐known villain, the Riddler, and the evil lead character Alex DeLarge in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange wore signature bowlers. Other Borsalino wearers ranged from Indiana Jones to the great western stars, from Johnny Depp to Audrey Hepburn. Current‐day popular music performer and producer Pharrel Williams wears one today.
Borsalino even has its own museum. The Borsalino Hat Museum has over 2,000 exhibits and is located in the old Palazzo Borsalino in Alessandria. It was set up at the beginning of the twentieth century by Arnaldo Gardella. Now it hosts shows, exhibitions, and cultural initiatives as well as having a section dedicated to showing how the Borsalino hat is made, still following the same traditional manufacturing process.32
Hats remain essential clothing in the Andes. One explanation is that the high altitude, where the sun’s rays are more intense and few shade trees grow, make hats a necessity. This accounts for the popular saying, “Use a hat, or your brain will melt.”33 Ecuadorian women still wear hats. They initially wore hats of Spanish origin, but then learned how to make them using sheep wool and felting. Different communities or ethnic groups often have their own variations in the style of hat they wear. The hats became part of the traditional outfit in the countryside. Various highland communities today maintain distinctive hats, ponchos, and embroidered blouses for normal daily wear. Women wear full pleated skirts in bright colors, often with embroidery around the hem. A woolen shawl doubles as a means of carrying shopping or babies on the women’s backs. Even in Quito, most of the women and the men dressed in traditional clothing wear felt hats.34
The hat, especially in Bolivia, is much more than protection from the sun, according to Haroldo de Faria Castro, a Bolivian author on hats. “It is the most important piece of an outfit” worn by the indigenous, he says. There is no shame in walking barefoot, but one must always wear a hat.35 In La Paz, it is the ultimate symbol of status. As a result, hat‐making remains a thriving business in home industry in Jatamayu and other towns to the current factory in Sucre. The cholas still represent the picturesque in La Paz; as one tourist declared, “the style that immediately caught my eye when arriving was the long silky skirts with layers of puffy petticoats, hand‐made shawls, alpaca leg warmers, waist length braids, and tilted bowler hats.”36 Hats also have a significant role in Bolivian fiestas. For El Día de los Fieles Difuntos, the hats are usually covered with red or black paper flowers. For weddings, the hats of the betrothed couple are often decorated with pieces of different‐colored paper. In religious fiestas, the pasante (the local name for the person who pays the costs of the celebration) receives guests by placing wreaths of large popcorn on their hats. The guests in turn pin 20 or 50 peso bills on the pasante’s hat. Each traditional fiesta has its own clothing with special touches. The Chuncho dancers from Tarija, for example, who dance for San Roque, wear colored feathers on their heads. The Morenada parades feature embroidered and decorated hats as part of this representation of Afro‐Bolivian slaves making a satire of Spanish slave‐owners. The Tinku ritual combatants wear heavy monteras of hard leather.37 These are a sampling of fiesta hats. In daily life, hats especially for working men such as miners and construction workers have declined with the adoption of more durable hard hats.
Indigenous women in Puno and in much of Andean Peru also choose to wear the derby‐style hat. Coincidentally these indigenous women who wear them are known as Cholas, like those in La Paz, and the hat was styled for them as the Chola hat.
For a sense of identity, status within the community, and definition of style or beauty, many communities continue to wear a representative hat, although the practice probably dates only from the colonial period. The cholitas of La Paz, nevertheless, continue to wear as their status symbol, not much more than a century old, the derby hat.
Additional Resources
Readings
1 E. Gabrielle Kuenzli, Acting Inca: National Belonging in Early Twentieth‐Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
2 Zoila S. Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
3 Regina Root, ed., Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
Notes
1 This chapter has benefited from the suggestions about research in Italian sources from Lucia Carminati of Texas Tech University, in Bolivian materials from Gabrielle Kuenzli of the University of South Carolina, in fashion essays from Regina Root of the College of William and Mary, and on Italians in La Paz from R. Matthew Gildner, Washington & Lee University.
2 1 Beverley Chico, “South American Headwear,” in Margot Blum Shevill, ed., Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Latin America and the Caribbean. Berg Fashion Library, pp. 456–464. eBook.
3 2 M. Lissette Canavesi de Sahonero, El Traje de la Chola Paceña (La Paz, Bolivia: Editorial Los Amigos del Libro, 1987), pp. 17, 19–21; “Las cholitas luchadores,” Mundo Hispano Los Cervantinos, http://mundohispanoloscervantinos.blogspot.com/2013/11/las‐cholitas‐luchadoras.html. The most thorough account of the rebellion is Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
4 3 Haroldo and Flávia de Faria Castro, “Bolívia dos Mil e Um Chapéus,” Revista Geográfica Universal, no. 44 (May‐June, 1978), p. 105, http://unboliviable.tumblr.com/post/11006496682/sombreros‐bolivianos.
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