Early one morning in June, a Panama hat weaver named Simon Espinal sat down to work at a wooden table in his house in Pile, an obscure village hidden in the hills near Montecristi, in Ecuador's ...

Creamy as silk and costlier than gold, a Montecristi superfino Panama hat is as much a work of art as it is of fashion. Gabriel Lucas irons a hat at his workshop in Montecristi, Ecuador.Credit ...

“In April 2012, I brought the idea of a high-end hat store to V Marketplace management and found a warm welcome. We moved to Napa Valley in May and opened Montecristi Panama Hats in V ...

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 ...

Black, a former creative director for Ogilvy & Mather, fell under the hats' spell on a trip to Ecuador more than 20 years ago. In Montecristi, where "Panama" hats were actually born (early ...

Black had recently read Tom Miller's book, The Panama Hat Trail—part praise ballad, part dirge for the dying art form of hat weaving—and in Montecristi, often called the spiritual home of the hat, he ...

A prized possession in the store today is a Montecristi Panama hat that is more than 90 years old. It was one of the gifts given to Chuck and Conseulo by Consuelo's father, Victor Soria ...

Winston Churchill had a Montecristi. So does the King of Sweden and the writer Tom Wolfe. But probably no one has ever worn a Panama hat better than Sean Connery, which shouldn't surprise anybody.