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Poll: What is Your Opinion of Tilley Hats

What is your opinion about or experience with a Tilley hat?

  • The best canoe hat I've ever worn

    Votes: 10 20.4%
  • A decent hat but nothing really special

    Votes: 12 24.5%
  • Never wore one, don't really care to, and have no particular opinion

    Votes: 11 22.4%
  • Yuck! It's too expensive, or overly trendy, or overrated, or an embarrassing fashion item

    Votes: 5 10.2%
  • Something else: What?

    Votes: 11 22.4%

  • Total voters
    49

Glenn MacGrady

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Pick the response that most closely matches your opinion of or experience with a Tilley. Add reasons or other discussion as you see fit. If you have had a Tilley, which model? Do you have preferences among the different models?

I've never owned one and am not motivated to.
 
A good hat for the long haul in sun, wind and rain.

Here's one happy Tilley wearing paddler on a 1000 mile Yukon race
1678393218010.png

Crossing the border at Eagle AK with a customs border inspector checking passports
1678393356859.png

And a few hundred tired miles later - no pin= different year race
1678393261112.png
 
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Thumbs down for me, had one once, too much hat, gets in the way portaging, plus I work hard not to be one of the cool kids. I'll stick my Toronto Maple leafs ball cap I found on the Nakina highway 20 years ago.
 
No real opinion. Never owned or worn one. A bucket hat is a bucket hat, at least so it seems to me.
 
The other favored hats, better for dipping in cool glacial melt temperature water to quench the skull during a hot day of paddling
1678394804368.png


Note the Stern paddler above, and here in the Adirondacks, always wears an Amish style straw hat, long known as "Straw Hat Guy"
1678394917887.png
 
I'm puzzled whether Tilley is a brand

Yes, it's a very popular brand in the USA and Canada. The brimmed hats were the original styles:

 
Here's a basic overview of hat styles. Clearly hat styles can reflect cultures and fashion, both subject to history.



I am sure there's a hat to suit every head out there. No one alike. And that's fine.
 
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I found a Wool Stetson Stallion in a junk shop that has more of a brim than the Tilley.
Screen Shot 2022-10-19 at 7.40.37 PM.png
 
I picked "something else", I will elaborate...........

I did once "own" a Tilley hat, it was salvage on one of my canoe trips in the mid 1980's, nice hat, used it for a couple of years until a different river reclaimed it!

I once visited the Tilley store with my mother who was looking for walking/hiking shoes, I was puit off by the sign on the front door that stated that ANYONE with even the remotest connection to the tobacco industry was not allowed to enter, my "connection" is minimal but I was/am a smoker of tobacco.

The hats where the only thing in the store I had even the slightest interest in, they seemed outrageously expensive and like everything in the store most suitable for an old guy with grey or no hair. At that time I did not fit either of those descriptions.

A few years latter I came across a "Tilley knockoff", an essentially the same hat made by Misty Mountain which cost about 20% of the Tilley version. I've been using that hat for about 25 years.

FYI - in 2015 Mr Tilley sold off the business to a UK private equity company, 3 years later it was sold again to a Canadian based company who moved pretty much all the production to Asia (previously all Tilley goods were "made in Canada"). You can now find Tilley branded goods at Costco and other places, the quality might be a slight step up from buying similar items on Alibaba but the old days of an actual "lifetime guarantee" are over.
 
I bought mine for canoeing, but it has become my warm weather hat for everything else also. Keeps the sun off my bald head and does a better job of shading my neck than a ball cap. Comfortable to wear and machine washes nicely.
 
I looked at a Tilley hat and they seemed well made, but the brim wasn't wide enough to provide enough shade, at least for me. Instead, I found a Dorfman-Pacific wide brimmed Aussie hat that has excellent shade and has held up for over 30 years. I bought a new one several years back but still wear the old one when working in the yard.
 
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Mine is thirty years old If you saw it the word that comes to mind would not br hip cool or yuppy
Its now a shade of brown green
 
Something else: The brim of Tilley hats is so pliable that it will be pinned against your forehead in a stiff wind, and the sun will roast your face. Other than that, nice hats.
 
I have been a fan of Tilley hats for over 40 years. I also used the guarantee when my sweat wore a hole in the front of my first one. I only like the original cotton “Aussie” style ones with the snap up sides and chin & head straps. The straps have saved my hats many times in strong winds. I have one of the newer nylon airflow hats and do not like it. My cotton hats were worn almost daily year round when I was measuring houses outside working as an appraiser. Their website states that the cotton “T3” models are made in Canada again. I think they got strong pushback when they outsourced them after the company was sold. I like the comfort (loose fit), versatility, weather protection and look of the original Tilley.
 
I seem to have acquired a collection of hats despite having always called myself "not a hat guy". I was generously gifted an original Tilley many years ago, tried it, hated it, regifted it. An old wool-felt fedora I picked up in Paris several years ago was happy on my head until we both got caught out in the rain. It went from magnifique to misérable. I will need to steam it back into shape. Until then it sits amongst some tripping gear up on a shelf. For the past few seasons I've worn any number of ball caps, but they mostly spend their time in a stacked pile in the front hall closet waiting to be called up. I have a new folding one that fits well under my cycling helmet, and I like it. It may stay there. My beater straw Panama is better suited to summer concerts in the park. Being a long hair, I sometimes wear bandannas, but I like the protection from the sun that brims provide. I tried a boonie type Tilley knock-off but it soon became my work hat, protecting me not from sun and rain, but from plaster, dust, and paint. I cherish two wool flat caps, both came all the way from Ireland, but I don't wear them. The two voices arguing up there where a hat should go haven't decided for me which hat style, if any, will be my next tripping hat. Packer? Fedora? Stetson? Wool? Waxed?
 
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