Wilgart

At the start of the 19th century, every man in Copenhagen wore a cap or a hat. The city supported more than four hundred hatters and fifty workshops. By the 1960s that habit had died out completely, and in the mid-nineties the last Danish cap maker put down his needle. The profession disappeared along with him.

One man brought it back. In 2010, a young Dane named Silas Skram was traveling around Germany and heard about a workshop that still sewed classic caps by hand. He talked his way into a job there as an assistant, worked his way up to apprentice, and three years later, once he'd learned every trick of the trade, came back to Copenhagen.

Today he's the only cap maker left in the country, and every cap on his shelf carries a story. Take the Sixpence: a flat, soft cap cut from six pieces of fabric, originally from England. It appeared in the 16th century, when Britain's wool trade was in crisis and Parliament required every man and boy over six to wear an English-made cap on Sundays.

The famous News Boy, the eight-panel cap, got its name from the paperboys of the late 19th century. Steelworkers, construction workers, and factory hands wore it next, and the creators of Peaky Blinders brought it back into fashion.

The brimless Sailor cap traces back to the Skullcap, one of the oldest forms of headwear on earth.

And the Deerstalker, with its two peaks and folding earflaps, was originally made for deer hunting but became known worldwide as Sherlock Holmes's cap.

Wilgart's signature piece is the One-Piece-Crown cap, cut from a single piece of fabric. Caps like this were worn in the 1920s and '30s, then fell out of fashion, and people stopped making them. Today only two workshops in the world still know how to sew them: Monsivais in Los Angeles and Wilgart in Copenhagen.

Besides caps, Silas sells hats: his own "Doctor Zhivago" ushankas, felt fedoras from the Danish workshop Andersen & Berner, and straw Panama hats from Ecuador. He also sells silk scarves, scarves in tweed or cashmere, gloves, belts, suspenders, and even classic shaving kits.

You could probably think about Wilgart's headwear the same way you'd think about a classic men's watch: it's an accessory that only means something if you know what you're looking at. Here too, every cap comes with its own story of origin, a tradition, and the maker who put it together.