what do you do when a hat gets soaked in rain?

you let it dry flat, at room temperature, and you reshape the crown and brim by hand while the fabric is still damp. a soaked hat is not a crisis. cotton twill has survived rain for as long as cotton twill has existed. the crisis, if there is one, happens after the rain — in the twenty minutes someone spends trying to speed-dry a hat on a radiator or with a hairdryer, which is the actual cause of most rain damage.

start by shaking off surface water and blotting the crown and brim with a dry towel, pressing rather than rubbing. don't wring the fabric — twisting a six-panel crown out of shape is easy to do wet and hard to undo dry. set the hat brim-down on a flat surface, or crown-down over a bowl or jar roughly the size of your head, so it holds its dome shape as the fibers contract slightly during drying. cotton does shrink a little when it goes from soaked to dry; letting it dry in the shape you want it to keep is how you control that, rather than fighting a stiff, wrong-shaped hat afterward.

what actually goes wrong if you skip this

heat is the main risk. a hairdryer, a radiator, direct sun on a car dashboard — anything that dries the hat fast also dries it unevenly, and cotton twill that dries unevenly puckers, especially along the topstitching and the brim edge. the second risk is leaving it damp and balled up in a bag. cotton that stays wet for more than a day, especially somewhere warm, can start to smell musty or, in bad cases, spot with mildew. that smell doesn't wash out easily once it sets in. so the rule is really just: get air moving around it, and do it soon, not eventually.

white embroidery holds up fine in rain — thread doesn't run the way dye can, so a wordmark won't bleed onto the crown. if the hat has any darker trim or a colored lining, dry it away from anything pale it could transfer onto while still wet. the brim is the part worth watching most closely, since a saturated brim can go slightly soft and lose its set. once dry, a light reshape with your hands — pressing the dome back into form, easing the brim edge back to where it usually sits — brings it back to normal. you generally don't need an iron or steam for this; body heat and a little pressure over a few minutes does the job for twill.

when it's actually fine to just wear it wet

a hat getting rained on while you're wearing it is different from a hat sitting soaked in a bag. worn wet, it dries on your head over the course of an afternoon with no issue — the shape holds because it's on a head-shaped form the whole time. the problem only starts once you take it off wet and leave it flat, folded, or stuffed somewhere it can't breathe. so if you're caught out in rain, the least you need to do is take the hat off as soon as you're indoors and give it room, rather than leaving it on a hook or in a bag until tomorrow.

none of this is specific to any one hat — it's true of any cotton twill piece, including the one we make. rain isn't the enemy here. a closed bag and a hot vent are.

light black, bell-shaped bucket hat220 USDT · made to order, ships in about 8 weeks · seoulsee the hat →

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