Here’s a quick post, just to show how my top hat looks now that I’ve polished it. To polish a silk top hat, you use velvet (and preferably wet the hat), and just brush the hat anticlockwise with the velvet. This aligns the silk so it all lies flat and parallel, giving a better shine.
Compared, here’s the photo of the hat before the polish.
Unfortunately, my top hat has slight structural damage (due to having being knocked before I bought it – there are a few lumps and bumps on the structure underneath the silk, and now that the silk lies flat it’s more visible. This can be repaired, but I’ll have to get it done professionally by Patey’s Hats in London. You can see one of these lumps on the middle of the left side of the hat in the top photo.
Beautiful hat! Congratulations. I want one just like that, but where I live (in Australia) they are as rare as hen’s teeth. Even more rare is an opportunity to wear a top hat in Australia. Now we just need to see a photo of it in action!
J – I will make sure to pressure my husband in to wearing the topper! I wish there was a good occasion to dress up. My sister gets married in July but I’m not sure she’d appreciate us coming in fancy clothes when she is having a simple wedding.
Did you end up buying a velvet pad or making one? I am soon to be the recipient of a top hat that I will need to clean up but I’m rather loath to spend £20 on a velvet pad and a further £30 on a hat brush. Methinks eBay may have some vintage hat brushes and I can just fashion a velvet pad easily from a scrap provided by a local fabric shop…
I seem to have recently become obsessed with top hats though! I need to find the perfect one but this either means spending £1k at a hatters or buying something from eBay with a bit of trial and error [buy, try, clean, resell, repeat until found perfect style/price, get reconformed at a hatters...]. Lol
I made my velvet pad, I just bought a sheet of cotton velvet (Silk obviously works, as does cotton, and the Lock & Co velvet pad is rayon, so that works too. I’d avoid true synthetics like polyester though, as I wouldn’t trust the plastic on the hat silk).
I won three hat brushes (and a clothes brush) in an eBay auction – click here.
I managed to make a velvet pad [some velvet and some wadding stuffed inside] and bought a brush from eBay
I just got a top hat that is flawless and needs no restoration whatsoever [extremely lucky on eBay that day]. I may get it reconformed to fit perfectly [easil done] but I need not clean the hat at all. I may polish it though to get a higher sheen.
From my conversations with Patey, they told me that one should polish silk toppers with tallow as that will waterproof the silk.