Nicholas Daley Hand-Crocheted Bucket Hats

Crochet and knitting are not the same craft and the difference shows in the object. Knitting works many live loops across a row on two needles; crochet works one loop at a time with a single hook, building the fabric stitch by stitch. Crochet cannot be done by machine at any scale, which is the whole economics of a piece like this, and it produces a denser, more sculptural, more open-structured fabric than knitting does. A crocheted hat holds a brim without any wire or stiffener in it.

The yarn is a jute blend, which is unusual and specific. Jute is a coarse bast fibre grown mostly in Bengal, historically spun into sacking and rope, and it was the industry that built Dundee, the same city whose waxed cotton runs through the rest of this collection. Daley has drawn on the jute trade before. Using it in a hat rather than in a sack is the kind of move his work is built from, and the contrast colours are what turn a rough fibre into something you would put on your head.

The colours

Crochet is worked one loop at a time with a single hook, and that changes what a colour change costs. On a knitting machine a second colour means a second carrier, a setup, and yarn carried along the back of the work. On a hook it means a knot. Nothing has to be planned into a machine and nothing is floated behind the fabric, so a maker can put three colours into an object the size of a hat without adding anything to what it costs to make.

That is why most of these are combinations rather than colours: cream, pink, and green; mustard, clay, and brown; red, black, and gold; lilac, burgundy, and gold; white and black. Read as a list they look like a menu of alternatives. They are closer to being what the technique naturally produces, which is a fact about how the hat is made rather than a range of options offered. The blue is the only one of them that is a single colour, and it is the one to take if you would rather the construction were the thing noticed.

Sizing and how it is worn

A bucket brim, worn down. It is sized the way hats are sized, by head measurement in centimetres rather than by a letter, at 59cm and 61cm. Measure around your head just above the ears and take the nearer of the two. Crocheted fabric has real give, so it is more forgiving of head size than a woven hat of the same measurement, and it will relax a little with wearing. It packs flat and recovers, which a stiffened bucket hat does not.

We took this because a hand-crocheted hat is made in genuinely small numbers and because jute is a fibre almost nobody uses in clothing. It also does the thing a Santa Fe summer actually requires, which is shade with air moving through it.

Hand-crochet and jute both run back through Nicholas Daley's earlier collections, and the accessories are where the hand-worked side of the house is most concentrated.

Contrast-colour jute mix yarn, hand-crocheted in England. We do not hold the fibre proportions, only that the yarn is a jute mix. Colours: blue; cream, pink, and green; mustard, clay, and brown; red, black, and gold; lilac, burgundy, and gold; white and black.

With the Wide Beach Short and the Aloha Shirt in summer. With the Knitted Vest, which is the same hand-worked family. The combinations are loud, so let the hat be the loud thing and keep what is under it plain. Blue is the one that will go next to a check without arguing with it.

Hand wash cool and reshape it damp, then dry it flat away from heat and sun. Jute is a plant fibre and will stiffen if it is dried hard or in direct sun. Never put it in a machine. Our fabric care guidance covers the rest.

The Patchwork Tam O Shanter is the patchworked cotton hat and the Utility Bucket Hat in cumin the hand-dyed one. The Neck Bag carries the same jute, and the Knitted Vest in green is crochet at garment scale. Everything we carry from Nicholas Daley is listed together.