20X Beaver Vintage Rugged Tough Old West Cowboy Hat 6 7/8 Yellowstone Rodeo Rip

  

Please see all 12 images. This is an extremely nice beaver felt hat. It has an Old West Rugged Character Style. The hat comes out of Texas.

Please look at my other items as I'm listing a lot of my film props and antiques. Generally the older the hat the higher quality beaver felt. The felt quality is very high. The fact is, we don't really have a sure-fire way to know what the Xs mean.

Sadly, Stetson did not keep records for posterity on how much beaver to rabbit fur mix was contained in its products. It was an industry secret, in any case, and one that Stetson would not have made public during the hat heyday, anyway. So, the fact is we don't know at all how much beaver fur was in Stetson's hats. We don't know with precision what the Xs mean.

Sadly, there is no way at all to ever ascertain just how much beaver is in any particular X quality hat. Further, that formula changed as the decades moved on. Triple X hats in the 1910s were of better felt quality that the XXX hats of the 1950s and the XXX hats of the 50s were far superior to those of the 1970s. It is patently obvious that the fur content and finishing process was radically different from era to era, so a three X hat from 1920 and one from 1970 are in no way at all similar in quality. Cost cutting in manufacturing and costs for materials were major reasons for this disparate quality.

But saying that a XXX hat from 1922 was as high as 50% is just a guesstimate. In fact, we are only "pretty" sure that a Cowboy hat marked 100X today is 100% beaver (but made of the most delicate part of the beaver, the belly fur) or that a 50X is 50% beaver, a 25X is 25%.

As to the "other" X hats, a old 7X is likely also 100% beaver (but not of that special belly fur). But even that is more or less a guess by collectors. Also, there are fur felt hats made of vicuna fur, nutria fur and chinchilla, too. Stetson even had a line of hats made of buffalo fur.

As to today's Xs, most collectors just ignore the whole scheme as they don't seem to make any sense at all. Most collectors feel that the Xs lost all meaning before the year 1970's dawned.