There are perhaps three custom hat makers left in the whole of the United States, and one of them has been going since 1922. Worth & Worth is the oldest hat shop in New York, and by some distance the most storied. To understand why a hat from this house means something, you have to know two stories: the hundred years of the name, and the one remarkable man who rescued it.
Let me start with the man, because he is the reason there is still a story to tell.
The artist who whittled his way in
Orlando Palacios was born in Los Angeles in 1964, his family originally from the small village of Santa Teresa in Nicaragua. He was not born into hats. He came to them sideways, the way the most interesting people usually arrive at their calling. In 1990 he started a small company carving wooden hat blocks, the sculpted forms over which every felt hat is shaped, and he supplied them to the hat industries of Europe and South America. Carving those blocks, handling the very bones of the craft, he fell in love with hat-making itself.
So he did the brave thing. He left California, moved into a loft in Hell's Kitchen, and set out to become a hat-maker in New York. He worked with the owners of Worth & Worth for several years, and in 1999 he bought the company outright, becoming its fourth owner and its head designer. And here is the detail I love most: Orlando Palacios is the only milliner in the United States who still carves his own wooden hat blocks. The man did not just buy a hat company. He arrived already holding the most fundamental skill in the trade, one almost no one else alive still practises.
He did not buy his way into hats. He carved his way in, one wooden block at a time.
A hundred years before he arrived
The name he inherited already carried a century of weight. Founded in 1922, Worth & Worth grew through the golden age of the American hat, when a man was not dressed without one. Under John Margulies, who ran it for twenty-five years to its silver anniversary in 1948, the shop found lifelong clients in two men who knew a thing or two about presence: Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart. Imagine the hats that passed across that counter. The company changed hands again in 1959 and later still, was named Hatter of the Year in 1983, and was long acknowledged as the oldest hat shop in the city. It is a lineage, and Palacios understood that he was not its inventor but its custodian.
What he did with it
Rather than embalm the brand as a museum piece, he brought it roaring back to life. He kept the centuries-old techniques intact while making the designs fresh enough to catch a new generation, and the fashion world noticed. Worth & Worth has collaborated with Louis Vuitton, Thom Browne, John Varvatos, and more, and its hats have crowned everyone from Keith Richards and Elvis Costello to Beyoncé. Rolling Stone dubbed the house the rock and roll haberdasher. Time Out named Palacios one of the most stylish men in New York. All of it earned, none of it bought.
The Super Fino, and what real luxury costs
If you want to understand the ceiling of this craft, ask Orlando about a Montecristi Panama. These are not made in Panama at all but woven by hand in Ecuador, and the very finest grade, the “Super Fino,” is woven so tightly and so slowly that only a handful of weavers on earth can still produce one. Palacios brings as few as five of the top grade to New York in a year. The best can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and when you understand that a single hat can take months of a master weaver's life, the number stops sounding absurd and starts sounding almost fair. It is, as he puts it, rarer than a perfect diamond and infinitely more refined.
Why this is my kind of house
Everything I believe about clothes is present in this one shop. A thing made by hand, by someone who understands it down to the wooden block it is shaped on. A refusal to let a century of craft die just because the world got faster. And a man who arrived not through money or marketing but through genuine skill and love of the work. In a world of the mass-produced and the instantly acquired, as Palacios himself says, there is little room left for carefully crafted, handmade treasures. Worth & Worth is one of the last places keeping that room open.
If you find yourself in New York, it is worth the pilgrimage: Worth & Worth, and the story of Orlando Palacios in his own words.
Dress for yourself, not the room. And if you are going to wear a hat, wear one that fits no head on earth but yours.
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