One of my favourite possessions is my Tilley. Yes, I know that most people who wear them are at least a generation older than I am. Yes, I know they’re hardly fashionable. I could care less–I am quite fond of my khaki/olive T5.
Here’s the thing: it fits–no small thing for a man who was laughed out of a hat factory for having a head too big to be accommodated–and it keeps the ever-so-fair skin on my bald head from getting horribly, horribly burned by that flaming ball of gas.
I have also always been somewhat amused by the whole Tilley idea: the eternal guarantee, the “an elephant can eat it and you can get it back unharmed” shtick, the brag tags, etc.
I got my Tilley roughly a decade ago, and it’s stood me in good stead on three or four continents–depending on how you count Israel–over the intervening years. I haven’t got a burn on my noggin that entire time, although I’ve had some lovely ones on other exposed areas.
And today, on the first real day of my vacation, about half-way through the day, I noticed that there was some fraying of the fabric near the front of the hat. I touched it, gently, and my finger went right through the sweat-soaked fabric like it was a wet tissue, rather than indestructible hardy cotton weave.
Witness:
Or a closer look:
My wife posits this as the final victory for my “highly acidic” sweat over fine haberdashery.
This is somewhat inconvenient, since I have eight more days on vacation in a sunny, sunny place, and am very far from Tilley’s homebase. I guess I’ll make due with the rip for the rest of the trip, and then we’ll see how that guarantee actually works out.
I wonder if I could get them to replace my now defunct T5 with one of the the newer, more ventilated, models…
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