There is a cap arriving today.
I have been waiting for it for nearly three months.
In that time, the project has moved beyond the instructions it was made from.
That sounds like a contradiction, but I think it may make the object more useful.
The cap was ordered from Laird Hatters from notes, measurements, photographs and conversations accumulated during the first weeks of developing the PIAFEIRA Touring Cap. There was no technical drawing. No finished pattern. No designer’s specification. I knew what I was trying to achieve, and a hatmaker somewhere at Laird had to interpret that information and turn it into an object.
While they were doing that, I kept working.
I was introduced to Bill Vero, and he gave me access to his archive. His assessment of what existed at that point was simple:
“It’s a simple idea. But it’s a good advancement within a sporting cap, for a particular use. You’ve got good materials. You’ve got a good idea. And it’s something slightly different in what could be a very competitive market. But I am sure you could find a niche… And it’s a marketable product. It might not be a huge seller, but something you could manage yourself.”
— Bill Vero, 22 July 2026
Ollie Leston completed the first Run Trial, and John Nash showed me two caps he had modified himself to keep them on his head while driving.
At the same time, I was speaking to hatters, cap manufacturers, leather workers, fastener suppliers, box makers, car clubs and people who knew how some of these things used to be made. Samples arrived. Measurements changed. Things were made, tested, rejected and made again.
None of this was organised as a design process. I was following the object wherever the next question took me.
And then I met Giuseppe Savoca.
Giuseppe is now doing something quite different from what I asked Laird to do.
The prototypes had already answered the first question: the idea worked.
What remained was how far it could be taken.
Laird was given my answer. Giuseppe is being asked how good the answer can get.
When I first started this project, I was doing what I normally do when I want something that doesn’t exist: finding materials, buying components, making things, trying them, changing them and trying again.
It was mostly ingenuity and trial and error.
Nobody had yet told me where a press stud should sit. I put it where I thought it should sit.
Nobody had established the correct width for the chinstrap. I made one and wore it.
The strap needed to disappear when it wasn’t required, so I put it along the brim.
I wanted to change the strap without changing the cap, so it became detachable.
Some of those decisions may survive. Some may turn out to be wrong.
That’s precisely why I wanted someone else to look at it properly.
Giuseppe is now working through the Touring Cap as a designer and maker. Fit. Proportion. Construction. Strap geometry. Materials. Hardware. The relationship between the cap and the person wearing it.
Eventually there will be drawings, measurements and specifications.
But the strange thing is that the object commissioned before any of that work existed is arriving first.
I like that.
The temptation would be to regard it as obsolete before opening the box.
It isn’t.
It is a physical record of what the Touring Cap was before the specification.
A hatmaker received a set of instructions from someone who had never designed a cap and had to make decisions in the gaps.
Which seams?
Which construction?
How much crown?
How should the peak behave?
How should the back adjust?
Where does the strap attachment actually land once a two-dimensional measurement becomes a three-dimensional object?
I don’t know what decisions were made yet.
I haven’t opened the box.
That is the point of writing this now.
I don’t want the finished object to rewrite the memory of what happened before it existed.
There will probably be things wrong with it.
There may also be things I hadn’t thought of.
Prototype 001 was wrong, and it taught me something.
The cap John Nash modified himself was never intended to answer a design brief, and it taught me something.
The Everoak objects weren’t PIAFEIRA ancestors waiting conveniently in an archive, and they taught me something.
A useful object doesn’t always arrive by giving you the answer you expected.
Sometimes it gives you a better question.
When the Laird cap arrives, I want to record it before deciding what it is.
I want to see the object as it arrived, before handling it, and then experience it for myself.
Then I will try it on.
After that, Giuseppe’s work will eventually give us another object to put beside it.
Not necessarily Laird versus Giuseppe.
Not old versus new.
Not wrong versus right.
Something more useful:
what I asked for before the study, and what we learned after it.
