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.

Emmie bought me a new safety razor a few days ago. It’s an English 1930s Gillette in the original case. I haven’t tried it yet, but it feels great rolled around in my hand. A little heavier than my first razor.

My hat collection is growing and growing, despite having sold two hats. I’ve recently got two more hats, and have another hat and a cap coming soon.

Here is my current collection:

Top Hat
	Saying you don’t look good in a hat is like saying you don’t look good in shoes!
Bowler Hat	Homburg
Black Fedora	Black Trilby
Beige Trilby	Brown Fedora

When you watch old television shows, films, or read old books, sometimes fathers teaching their sons how to shave crops up. I grew up without my father, and just learnt to shave the way most people do nowadays – trial and error, with a cheap plastic razor and some cheap artificial soap in a can. I always wondered why fathers ever bothered teaching their sons, as it’s so easy to learn. Eventually, I read about wet shaving with a safety razor, and it made sense that sons got taught – it’s much harder to do.

I wanted to learn to shave with a safety razor, as I enjoy ritual and older ways of doing things, but had no safety razor to try with. However, Emmie found a safety razor & shaving brush for me at a flea market around 6 weeks ago. I already had a safety razor case as a gift from Emmie’s mum, and I dug it out and the razor fit perfectly.

With the use of the interweb I managed to date the razor to the early 70s, but the case and blades (there were a lot included – I won’t be using them though, as they’re 80 years old) are from the 20s. The razor is wonderful, but doesn’t the case just look amazing? Why would you want to use a modern plastic thing when you can have something like this?

It takes a little longer to shave this way, but it’s absolutely worth it. The close shave a safety razor gives is unparalleled by any method short of a cut-throat razor and it’s wonderful to your skin (unlike a modern razor with 4-5 blades, which causes many men so much irritation). Emmie hates it when I use it as she’s afraid of it – they use raw razor blades, and it’s much easier to cut yourself with one.

Shaving with a safety razor is quite different to modern shaving – you do need to get a proper, traditional shaving soap that you lather up with a brush and lots of water, and you need blades and a razor, which is a high cost up front compared to modern shaving, but in the long run it’s worth it. The only waste is some soap down the sink and a solid metal blade, which you can recycle. On top of that, the soap lasts so much longer – you use a toothpaste sized amount of soap, and I estimate my current soap will last well over a year. The blades are incredibly cheap (I recently bought 35 razor blades for less than the cost of an 8 pack of Mach 3 blades). On top of all that, you get an incredibly close shave. I’d recommend it to anybody that wants to give it a go.

Well, this blog is supposed to be a joint effort, so it’s time I stop slacking and start writing. I’ve had a few blogs, but the only thing consistent with them is that I stop updating after a while. Emmie’s managed to keep her other blog going for years, and it’s only currently on an update hiatus because there’s nothing to update about. My first few posts are going to be cross-posts from my old blog. I’m also quite interested in attire, although in a quite radically different way to Emmie. I’m not going to blog exclusively about what I wear, however, as you’ll see. This first post will be regarding one of my most treasured vintage items of attire, even though it’s one of the few I have never worn – my top hat.

Emmie bought this hat for me at a second hand shop for 150kr (£12.50 / $18). I wasn’t there at the time, but we share the same head size and she felt it fit quite well on her. The hat came with a box, which was quite battered, but I was thrilled.

When Emmie gave me the box and I took the hat out, I noticed that there was some newspaper at the bottom of the box. I can only assume it was there to prevent dust getting through the holes in the box. A quick glance at the newspaper gave a date of the 22nd September, 1956, showing that the hat was not a modern creation, and I became even more excited. I noticed that the hat was made by “H.J. Olsson”, in a town quite near where I live.

For a while after that, however, I couldn’t find out much about the hat. Nobody on the vintage forum I frequent, The Fedora Lounge, had any ideas regarding it, and I couldn’t find any information online from the names I had found on the hat’s lining.

One day, while looking at the hat, I noticed it was made in Eslöf. Until then I had read it as Eslöv, the name of a town quite near where I live, so I naturally assumed that the hat had come from there. A little bit of research revealed that Eslöf is the archaic name for Eslöv, so I thought it could assist with a more accurate ageing of the hat. I contacted the Eslöv bibliotek (library), asking if they would be able to provide any further information. I was quickly contacted by a librarian, who, over a few e-mails, informed me that the hat shop was opened in 1890, and closed down in 1966, and for the last 20 years was not run by the Olsson family. She also informed me that the name of Eslöv was changed to Eslöf in 1927. This meant that the hat was created some time between 1890 and just before 1930.

I also checked the quality of the hat, the feel of the material used to create the hat, and the quality of the light reflection, and determined that the hat is made of traditional silk plush. This makes the hat a much higher quality top hat, and makes the price Emmie bought it for even better – silk plush is much blacker than the modern alternatives, and has a much more defined shine – however, there are no looms left capable of creating the silk plush required, and obviously not enough demand for anybody to research the possibility of creating a modern loom that is capable. Top hats are one of the few items that royalty buy second hand – a second hand silk top hat is much better than a modern melusine.

I still need to acquire or create a velvet pad to give the top hat the proper shine it deserves – since receiving the photos I have purchased some hat brushes and brushed the hat, but I need a velvet pad to get it into perfect condition.