Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes. William H. Beezley
did not want to jeopardize successful general sales to these companies in Huanuni, Uncia, and other nearby places. The company opposed the idea of the Borsalino company giving Galoppo exclusive rights and noted that Portillo and Marin were two of its best customers with business valued at thousands of pounds sterling each year. Marin & Co. of Oruro, for example, had developed a strong relationship with Laneri, who provided an endless variety of assorted merchandise, and the company’s warehouses stored products, it was said, “from all climates” with an assortment as complete as the trade fairs of Leipzig and Nizhny Novgorod. Galoppo soon opened Sombrerería Nacional, which eventually earned a reputation for its hats throughout Bolivia.
Even more intense competition existed in La Paz. As early as 1884, the Italian consul in La Paz, Roberto Magliano, reported 300 Italians in the country, with the majority in the capital. They included merchants and pharmacy, clothing, and general store owners, along with 150 Franciscan brothers and 36 Santa Clara nuns.15 The capital Italians felt numerous and successful enough in 1910 to found the “Sociedad Italiana de Beneficencia Roma.” By 1919, G. De Nota was selling Borsalinos in La Paz. His offerings for men included the old style with loose, silk lining. He bought a minimum of 100 dozen per year. The male consumers here, according to reports, wanted a hat that featured both aesthetics and durability. Beyond Laneri’s retail clients in the city, another source of hats resulted from his sales to a dealer in the Peruvian town of Yunguyo on Lake Titicaca bordering Copacabana, Bolivia, a short distance from La Paz. The Yunguyo retailer, beyond limited local sales, filled resale orders from nearby La Paz, apparently largely delivered by smugglers. The contrabandistas, who were perhaps women,16 soon specialized in Ciola or Cholita hats.
The hat vendors in La Paz included a second‐generation Italian immigrant couple, Domingo Soligno and his wife, from Buenos Aires, perhaps by way of Salta. They arrived in La Paz confident they could succeed in the haberdashery business with a shop popularizing imported men’s hats. Perhaps the Solignos were familiar with their countrymen’s enterprise in Bolivia through the trade from Salta to La Paz that had been disrupted by, if not completely replaced with, goods shipped from Antofagasta to Oruro when a railroad opened in 1892.
Soligno ordered a supply of derbies, the style called bowlers by the Irish railroad construction workers who wore them as they built a railroad in Bolivia. The hats that arrived were too small for most workmen and they were brown, and the workmen wore black. Neither the workers nor Bolivian men wanted them. At that point Soligno developed a marketing strategy, perhaps even giving some away as samples, to sell the hats to the Cholitas.17 He promoted them as more fashionable than the ones with provincial Cochabamba origins they were wearing, indicated the crowns had space for their braids that would hold the hats without pins, and, as an added appeal, claimed that the crown’s height signaled the marital status of the woman to potential suitors. Another popular tale claimed Soligno’s Borsalinos increased the fertility of women.18 These Borsalino hats, the bombín, became widely adopted and because of their higher price became the ultimate expression of conspicuous consumption for Cholitas who wanted to demonstrate their economic success.19 Within a few years, the bowlers became standard. Successful Cholitas displayed their status with lavish jewelry, especially large, dangling earrings, nylon stockings, vicuña shawls, and several Borsalino hats in different colors.20
The success of these Italian hat vendors and other merchants who were members of the Italian Club resulted in 1926 in the presentation to La Paz of a statue of Genoese navigator Cristóbal Colón in honor of the centennial of independence. The statue stands in the center of July 16 Avenue in the center of La Paz.
Soligno, José Escobar (who would become a well‐known hat maker) and others soon imported the derbies, probably through the Lineri company. Several of the Italian merchants decided to join together to create a factory for clothes items, but they could not agree, and only Soligno continued with the plan. Eventually, he established the Lanificio Boliviano Domingo Soligno (The Domingo Soligno Bolivian Wool Clothing Factory), likely inspired by Lanificio F.LLI Cerruiti,21 founded in 1881 and based on an earlier company in Biella, Piedmont, his family’s Italian homeland. The hats he made and sold, along with those sold by other merchants, connected the Cholitas to Italy’s most fashionable milliner, and the Solari company remained the most important wholesale business for years, at least until sometime between 1929 and 1936, when European events disrupted Italian businesses and American trade.22
Since the mid‐nineteenth century, Borsalino had been a name synonymous with Italian hat‐making. Its founder, Alessandro Giuseppe Borsalino, was born in 1834 in Alessandria, a small town in northwest Italy. By the age of 14, he was working in a hat factory. After visiting other factories across Italy and France to learn more about the trade, in 1850, the aspiring entrepreneur went to Paris, the center of fashion including hats, as an apprentice in the Berteil company. Seven years later, in 1857, he and his brother Lazzaro opened the Borsalino workshop and Giuseppe introduced new handmade, elaborate processes that took many weeks to produce the felt hats. This Italian business pioneer soon became a global captain of industry as the company began the export of hats that became popular after 1914 in Andean South America.
The company made different styles, but two models in particular became associated with Borsalino: the Panama, made from paja toquilla fiber (Carludovica palmata), found particularly in Montecristi, Ecuador, processed with a technique called “the fuma” to produce its unique ivory color, and the derby, which was and still is made of felt and a mixture of different furs including rabbit, treated until it produces a soft fabric. The latter became extremely popular and was exported worldwide under the patented name “Borsalino.” Its unmistakable shape has reached iconic status over the years. The hats made the company a success. From the beginning, Giuseppe had respect for his workers and their needs, so he developed for them both health insurance and a pension fund. At his death in 1900, the company had nearly a thousand workers, boasted an annual production of one million hats, and exported 60 percent of its production overseas. Teresio Borsalino succeeded his father, headed the company for 39 years, and added to its success. By 1913, it employed more than 2,500 workers with an annual production of more than two million hats sold throughout the world. Teresio Borsalino’s nephew, Teresio Usuelli, the last heir of the Borsalino family, took over as chairman and served until 1979, when he left the company in the hands of Vittorio Vaccarino. In 1986 the company moved from its factory originally located in the center of Alessandria to a new, more efficient and modern site in the town’s suburbs. Initially, the old factory housed a hat museum until a few years ago, when the museum moved and the site became Eastern Piedmont University.23 Roberto Gallo now holds the title of CEO and president of the company and has expanded it to include Asia and the U.S. (with Borsalino America). There are now more than 15 flagship stores in Italy, France, and China. The Borsalino name has continued to figure prominently in fashion history. Today Borsalino’s hats extend beyond the classic felt derby and the famous straw “Panama‐Montecristi” to new styles targeting the young hat wearer. All the world’s fashionable stores, such as Harrods in London and Saks on Fifth Avenue in New York, stock Borsalino’s famous hats. The company now has men’s, women’s, and children’s ready‐to‐wear collections as well as accessories from perfumes to eyewear. With an annual turnover of almost 30 million Euros, Borsalino remains the leader in Italian hat manufacturing. Over the years the Borsalino family has not only made an impact on the history of fashion with their famous hats, but also they have influenced the history of their town. They are renowned for the charitable work they have done since the company started. They have financed public works, from the aqueduct to the orphanage to the