Cowboy hats

The hat is the piece of western wear that most feels like dressing up, and the one people most often buy wrong. Two decisions account for nearly all of it: material, and size.

Straw first, always

Almost every first-hat mistake is buying felt. Felt is a cold-weather material and a dress material; the event most people are buying for is a summer one, where felt is genuinely uncomfortable. It is also several times the price - and you will mistreat your first hat. You will sit on it, leave it on a car seat in the sun, and get caught in rain in it. Doing all of that to a straw hat is survivable. Doing it to 6X fur felt is not.

Buy straw, wear it for a season, and learn which brim width suits your frame and which crown height you like. Then buy felt knowing all three. The comparison in full is at felt vs straw cowboy hats.

Size is not S/M/L

Hats are sold in numbered sizes for a reason. Measure around your head about an inch above your ears and across the middle of your forehead - where the hat band actually sits - and divide the inches by about 3.14. A 22 3/8 inch head is roughly a 7 1/8. A quarter of an inch is half a hat size, so measure twice.

Two complications nobody mentions. Hair: measure with your hair in the style you will actually wear - a ponytail or braid changes the number noticeably. Head shape: many heads are oval rather than round, and a correctly sized round hat on an oval head pinches front and back while sitting loose at the sides, which produces a headache within an hour. Better makers sell long oval shapes. The full method is in cowboy hat sizing.

The X rating, honestly

X ratings describe felt quality - broadly, the fur content and the fineness of the felting. More X means finer, lighter and more water-resistant felt that holds its shape better. The crucial caveat is that the scale is not standardized between makers, so a 6X from one brand is not the same material as a 6X from another. Use it within a brand's range, not across brands. For a first felt hat, 6X is the right answer: below it the hat will not hold its shape, above it you are paying for refinement you will not notice yet.

Crease and brim

Buy a cattleman - a center dent with two side creases. It is the shape most people picture, it suits the widest range of faces, and it is what most pre-creased hats come in. For brim, four to four and a half inches is the classic proportion and suits most heights; narrower reads modern and gives less shade, wider is a working brim. Both can be changed later on a felt hat by a hatter with steam - and neither can be changed on straw.

The etiquette that is genuinely observed

Hat off indoors in a home and at a restaurant table; hat off and over your heart for the national anthem, a prayer and at a funeral; never set a hat down on its brim; and do not touch another person's hat. Those are real and noticed, particularly at rodeos. Most of the longer lists you will find online describe conventions nobody has kept for fifty years - see cowboy hat etiquette.