At the time of his passing, his son, Ernest, had just sold a software company and decided to take over the family business. He ran it through good times and bad for 70 years until his death in 2001. It’s thanks to Ben’s grandfather, Joseph DelMonico, that the store survived. “I think people kind of realized that dressing up isn’t that bad,” DelMonico said. Kennedy’s decision to eschew the traditional top hat and go hatless at his 1960 inaugural, but hat wearing was already waning at the time, he said.Īs the passions of the 1960s dissipated, hats made something of a comeback but never regained their former status as a staple of men’s fashion. Some attribute the beginning of headwear’s decline to John F. But in the 1960s, a new generation rejected traditional felt and straw hats as stodgy and square, and the business cratered. “We’re really an Internet company with a storefront,” Ben DelMonico said.īack when DelMonico Hatter was founded, hats were de rigueur for men, and there were about 30 hat shops in the Elm City, Ben DelMonico said. and Canada and as far away as China and Australia, they said. More than three-quarters of the store’s sales are online, with customers all over the U.S. You’d never guess it, but the cozy shop with a sign depicting Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter over the entrance is the nerve center of one of the largest Internet hat retailers in the nation, said Ben and his father Ernest DelMonico. “We carry some of the best brands in the world.”Īs impressive as DelMonico Hatter is – a dense thicket of headwear, with hats climbing the walls and clogging the floor – the store is but a fragment of the business. “We try to carry every kind of hat,” said Ben DelMonico, whose great-grandfather founded the store in 1908. Looking for a toasted crown panama fedora, a houndstooth pub cap or an Amsterdam boater? Yeah, they’ve got those. The downtown New Haven shop a stone’s throw from the green is bursting at the seams with every imaginable style and maker of headgear, from caps to derbies. That’s what DelMonico Hatter has been doing for more than 100 years.
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