Before Anything Was Found
A master-woven Panama hat for a museum donor
The ask
A few of us on the museum board want to thank, personally, the donor who paid for three summers of digging in the Montana badlands before the crew found anything worth publishing. This July they found the skull. He spends every season out at the quarry in the sun. Around $50,000.
The gift
A Montecristi Panama hat woven to order by Simón Espinal in Pile, Ecuador, at about 3,600 weaves to the square inch, some four times the count of a grade 30 superfino. A US dealer who has worked with him for twenty years blocks and finishes it by hand as a fedora. Dealers with decades in the trade rank Espinal first among living weavers. We take the donor's size from a hat he already wears.
Why it's extraordinary
A hat this fine takes its weaver at least eight months, longer than a weaver can risk on spec, so it is woven only on commission, agreed before anyone knows how it will turn out. He backed the digging on the same terms.
The moment
It goes out to the quarry on the man who paid for the digging, season after season, while the crew works out what else lies beside the skull.
A curator replies within one business day.
