Roberto Gerardi is the last Italian hatter

Imagine a hat from Borsalino, Gucci, or Loro Piana: the designer decides on the silhouette, but someone has to transform that silhouette into a physical object around which the hat can be formed. The uniqueness of Roberto Gerardi's work lies not so much in "making hats" as in building the object that allows the hatmaker to make them.

In practice, Gerardi creates hat blocks , the three-dimensional molds on which felt, straw, or other materials are molded to take on their final form. This work is much closer to sculpture and modeling than to traditional hat making. Roberto's workshop is located on the ground floor of an old building in Signa , a few kilometers from Florence: the family home, the foundry, the laboratory, the sales office—all in a small space of just a few square meters. Roberto's work consists of preparing molds, no more than three or four a day (about eight hundred a year), which are purchased by major hat brands: from Borsalino to Gucci, from Vuitton to Loro Piana.

The process works like this:

The maison wears a hat, a design or a shape of reference.
It can be an existing model or a completely new design.
Gerardi reconstructs the geometry of the head and hat.
The fundamental step is the manual creation of a plaster modelThis is where the craft becomes truly specialized: you have to transform a drawing or a soft object into a precise three-dimensional shape.
From the plaster model we get to the aluminum shape.
That shape becomes the industrial/artisanal mould on which the hat material will subsequently be worked.
The shape must be absolutely faithful to the model desired by the maison.
A small difference in the crown, the arch, the brim, or the proportions changes the appearance of the hat. This is why the shape is not simply a "support": physically determines the final design.