He had traveled there to find an authentic Panama hat, a centuries-old Ecuadorian handicraft, just to be clear. Black had recently read Tom Miller's book, The Panama Hat Trail—part praise ballad, part ...

Brent Black sells Panama hats that take 1,000 hours to make, about the same amount of work to pay for them, and all but float off your head. BTW: They don't come from Panama.

Designer Ron Arad’s trademark black felt hat has been cloned by Alessi as a limited edition – the Italian manufacturer’s first step away from houseware products into the world of fashion. Arad’s ...

Brent Black and his Panama Hat Company of the Pacific are selling handmade hats from Montecristi, Ecuador for the modest price of $25,000 – modest in that one of their cherished caps fetched ...

Some Panama hats can cost as much as $25,000. When is a Panama hat more like a work of museum-quality art? It all begins with the straw, which comes from a plant “cut at just the right time of ...

Mr. Black is the person who founded Brent Black Panama Hat, a Panama hat specialty store, in 1988, and has been developing high-quality hat weaving techniques in Montecristi, Ecuador.

But its growth industry is the basic black felt hat, selling more than 12,500 of them a year — largely purchased by the growing Satmar sect.

Brent Black sells Panama hats that take 1,000 hours to make, about the same amount of work to pay for them, and all but float off your head. BTW: They don't come from Panama.