How to Start a Designer Hat Collection: Practical Lessons From the 101 HATS Project and the Fifth 920 Hat Festival

Ask most people what makes a hat valuable and they will talk about price, brand, or fashion. Ask a serious collector and the answer sounds different: authorship, construction, material, condition, and the story of why the piece exists. That shift in thinking sits at the center of the 101 HATS project, a curated book slated for a global launch at the fifth 920 Hat Festival on September 20, 2026. Behind the book is a simple belief about hat collecting: the objects worth keeping are the ones that capture how people think and make today.

This guide turns that belief into practical advice for anyone who wants to build a designer hat collection, whether the goal is personal enjoyment, research, or a long-term cultural archive.

🔽 Quick Navigation

• 📌 Why Hat Collecting Is Having a Moment Around the Fifth 920 Hat Festival
• 📌 Collect the Present for the Future: A Philosophy You Can Apply to Your Own Collection
• 📌 What Makes a Hat Collectible: Craftsmanship, Authorship, Material, and Emotional Value
• 📌 Material by Material: How Straw, Felt, Feathers, and Wire Age Differently
• 📌 Documenting Your Collection: Provenance, Photography, and Designer Context
• 📌 From Private Collection to Shared Knowledge: Why Collectors, Museums, and Brands Need Each Other
  
• ❓FAQ

Why Hat Collecting Is Having a Moment Around the Fifth 920 Hat Festival

Hats have always been collected informally, tucked into hat boxes, inherited from relatives, or picked up while traveling. What is changing is the level of seriousness. A festival that brings together milliners, manufacturers, editors, and enthusiasts creates a shared vocabulary, and a published volume that selects 101 notable pieces gives that vocabulary a reference point. When respected figures from the international millinery world comment on a project like this, they signal that headwear deserves the same attention that other design fields have enjoyed for decades. The 920 Hat Festival is a natural meeting point for that conversation.

For newcomers, that attention lowers the barrier to entry. It becomes easier to learn which designers matter, what separates a handmade hat from a mass-produced one, and how to describe a piece accurately. For experienced collectors, it offers validation that careful documentation and thoughtful curation are exactly what the field needs. Either way, the fifth festival is a useful moment to ask a basic question: what should a good hat collection actually contain?

It also helps to remember that collecting is not the same as hoarding. A focused collection built around a theme, such as sculptural headpieces, regional straw weaving, or experimental felt work, tells a clearer story than a large accumulation with no organizing idea. Setting that theme early makes every later purchase easier to judge.

Collect the Present for the Future: A Philosophy You Can Apply to Your Own Collection

The most useful idea to come out of the project is a sentence attributed to its initiator, Sun Jianhua, widely known in the hat community as "Hat Bro." In his view, collecting is not only about protecting the past. It is about gathering the present so that it can serve the future, and leaving something meaningful behind for the industry is a rewarding journey in its own right. His broader work in hat culture, which you can read more about on the founder's page, shows how consistently he has applied that thinking, from assembling objects to sharing them publicly.

Applied to a personal collection, this philosophy changes buying habits. Instead of chasing only rare vintage pieces, a collector can also acquire strong contemporary work while the maker is active, the materials are known, and the story can still be recorded firsthand. That is how today's contemporary millinery becomes tomorrow's historical record. It also protects against a common regret: discovering decades later that nobody wrote down who made a piece, what it was made from, or why it mattered. Talking directly with a milliner about technique and inspiration, and saving that conversation alongside the object, can make a modest piece far more valuable to future researchers than an expensive one with no recorded history.

What Makes a Hat Collectible: Craftsmanship, Authorship, Material, and Emotional Value

Not every beautiful hat is a good collecting candidate. The project's editorial framing points to a useful set of criteria: the craftsmanship of the object, the thinking of its maker, and the emotional value it carries. The table below translates those ideas into a checklist a collector can use when evaluating a piece.

Used together, these criteria help separate a hat that is merely attractive from one that deserves a permanent place in a designer hat collection. A piece that scores well across several rows is usually worth the investment; one that scores well on appearance alone often is not. Construction quality in particular deserves attention, and the logic behind a multi-stage quality control process is a helpful mental model: inspect materials, structure, and finishing separately rather than trusting a single overall impression.

Material by Material: How Straw, Felt, Feathers, and Wire Age Differently

A collection is only as durable as its storage plan, and different hat materials fail in different ways. Natural straw hats, like a wide-brim straw fedora, can become brittle if stored in strong light or dry conditions, and they lose shape permanently if soaked. Wool felt hats, like a wool felt fedora, are more forgiving because heat and steam can often restore a crumpled crown, but they shrink if dried near a radiator and are vulnerable to moths. Conservation guidance from established hatters repeats the same practical rules: handle by the brim, store away from direct sunlight, and keep hats in a box rather than leaving them exposed.

Feathers and fine decorative elements need extra care. Because feathers are made largely of keratin, they attract dust and are vulnerable to light, pests, and moisture, a challenge museum conservators document for feathers found in composite objects such as hats. Structural wire can rust or distort under pressure, and applied embellishments can loosen over time. For sculptural pieces of the kind featured in the 101 HATS selection, a custom-fitted box with supports is usually better than a general closet shelf.

A simple rule works across most categories: store hats upright or crown-down in a rigid box, keep them cool and dry, and avoid stacking. Rotating pieces occasionally for gentle inspection helps catch problems early, before a small issue becomes permanent damage. Good hat storage also means controlling the environment: stable temperature, moderate humidity, and low light are far kinder to fibers, dyes, and glued trims than a sunny shelf or a damp cupboard.

Documenting Your Collection: Provenance, Photography, and Designer Context

Documentation is what turns a pile of hats into a collection. The goal is to record enough information that a stranger, decades from now, could understand each piece without asking you. A strong record usually includes the following:

• The designer or workroom, the year, and the place of purchase or commission
• Materials and techniques, described as specifically as possible
• Measurements, including crown height, brim width, and head size
• Clear photographs from several angles, plus close-ups of labels and construction details
• The story: why the piece was made, worn, or acquired

This is exactly the approach that a reference publication like 101 Hats: The Best in Modern Millinery formalizes at larger scale, pairing images with context so that each object can be read as part of a wider creative conversation. Individual collectors do not need a printing budget to follow the same logic. A well-organized spreadsheet and consistent photography already put a personal archive ahead of most, and adding a short note on the hat craftsmanship techniques visible in each piece makes the record useful to students and researchers as well as to the owner. The same principle underlies the hat museum in Nantong, where catalogued objects become a working research resource instead of simply a display.

From Private Collection to Shared Knowledge: Why Collectors, Museums, and Brands Need Each Other

Collectors, institutions, and manufacturers often treat one another as separate worlds, but each depends on the others. Collectors preserve objects and stories that might otherwise disappear. Museums give those objects a stable environment and a public audience. Manufacturers and brands translate lessons from historical and experimental pieces into wearable products, drawing on the same knowledge of structure, proportion, and material. When a company with a long manufacturing record also invests in cultural work, as described in its company profile and history, the exchange becomes two-way: production experience informs how collections are understood, and collections inform how new hats are designed.

That is the larger promise of a festival and a book appearing in the same year. The event creates a shared moment; the publication preserves it; and the collectors in the audience carry the knowledge forward by documenting what they own. Anyone building a hat collection today is therefore contributing, in a small way, to the record that future designers will study. For readers following the 920 Hat Festival and the 101 HATS book, the takeaway is practical: start with a theme, document everything, store with care, and share what you learn.