The Ultimate Vintage Tilley Hat Buyers Guide

Been thinking about the “vintage” dates for this project.

Per legend, the first hats made by Alex T. were made in 1980.  Now, I’ve never examined a first year Tilley hat, but I will surmise that these were largely custom made and may well have been sold without formal tags.  Fast forward a few months or a year or so and we begin to see something akin to industrial scale production, complete with size tags, labels etc.

Then, also according to legend, Alex sold Tilley Endurables Inc. to holding company no.1 in 2015.  It’s tempting to simply draw a line in the sands of time and say that anything made while Alex Tilley still owned the company (1980-2015) would be “vintage”, but as near as I can tell, the production of the hats was not significantly altered immediately after sale; i.e. still made in Canada with the same methods, from the same materials and by the same people, even the tags/labels are the same, at least until 2017.  In 2018, when Tilley Endurables Inc. was sold to holding company no.2, the changes to the company and its products, quickly became more noticeable. (Increasing “offshore” manufacture, increased externally visible branding, new models, decrease in both quality and number of sizes offered)

So… I guess I would propose that, for our current purposes, “vintage” should mean any Tilley hat, or other Tilley product, made in Canada between the years 1980-2017.  Maybe someday, after the robots take over, we can start to include all Tilley hats made by Humans, anywhere, could be included, but for now, let’s make it Canadian Human-made.  . 

Thoughts?

New - Any Tilley Hat not made in Canada

Sorry I wasn't clear.

What I meant was 1980 - until the WWW.TILLEY.COM shows up on the label. I guess that would be 1993. Easy way to tell if you have a Vintage or Used hat.

Well, rather conveniently, an oft used definition of “vintage” is older than 20 years but less than 100 years old (aka antique).

This sort of “moving target” definition would, currently, place a bright line very close to a fairly well established and easily identified marker in Tilley hat production, namely, the appearance of Roman numerals on the crown labels, circa 2003.

We are in the unique position of being able to choose which highlights of the Tilley production timeline are most significant.
For example, we could delineate products made before and during 900 Don Mills Rd.  In other words, hats made before 1987 could be considered “antique Tilleys” and anything made from 1987-2017 could be considered “vintage”.  Anything made since 2017 could be considered… well… either “used” or “brand new”.  

Somehow we need to enlarge our collection of Tilley catalogs, with particular attention on that first 1987 catalog.  Someone has to have one somewhere.  We will track it down eventually.

Pretty sure I read somewhere that it was 1987.