Find the perfect Panama hat to luxe up your summer threads

The heat, the glare, the dermatologist’s admonishments regarding melanoma. Whatever the reason, in summer, your head wants a hat.

Yet it may be having some trouble getting around the idea. In winter, covering your cranium is a no-brainer. The felt fedora serves admirably in many business-suited circumstances, despite its unsavory association with pickup artists and other poseurs. Tweed caps, merino beanies, and rabbit-fur ushankas likewise pull their weight in certain dressy contexts. But that weight was heavyweight, and now you want all the style provided by a hat with none of the heatstroke.

First, we’re not talking about rugged bush hats appropriate to the Outback. Nor are we considering New Era caps, found in the dining rooms of Outback Steakhouse. And while there is a place for a Tommy Bahama safari hat bought, in desperation and at a steep markup, from a hotel gift shop, that place is not atop a man walking to a client meeting.

One way to adjust to the summer season is to look for a lighter material of whatever style of brimmed hat best suits you in winter. It is very likely that your preferred choice—a fedora, a trilby, a porkpie, what have you—is also available in straw. Current models from such brands as Albertus Swanepoel and Paul Smith use raffia, a fibre made from membranes on palm fronds found across sub-Saharan Africa. But the dedicated hat-seeker will encounter more types of straw that he can shake a stalk of grass at— Florentine wheat straw and brittle bao straw , and Mexican sisal, and more. Some esteemed hat makers, including Borsalino , offer brimmed cotton hats, which might seem a little guitarist-in-a-bad-ska-band but can sometimes work.

It is even possible to purchase a straw top hat , though I can only imagine two gentlemen wearing such a thing: Mr. Peanut , weekending in Charleston, and Eustace Tilley , catching butterflies near his place in Sag Harbor. Point is, the novice summer-hat customer can do worse than to consider searching for a comfortably familiar design.

The phrase summer-weight hat generally summons visions of Panama hats, woven from the leaves of the toquilla palm. These are always airy but hardy, and the best of them, such as Montecristis , are ultrafine . “The joke in the UK is that you should be able to pull your Panama hat through your signet ring,” says Harry Brantly, a founder of the lifestyle brand Frescobol Carioca.

One alleged advantage is that the Panama travels well. Some hat makers tout its “rollability ,” while others speak frankly about the opposite. “Ours is not rollable,” Brantly said, explaining that, yes, you could roll one up and pack it in your suitcase, but after 20 times or so, you might as well just leave it there.