Travel to any part of the world where boating is popular and you’ll see people wearing his hats. Even though they’re now worn and sold in many countries, when we see the hat that Alex Tilley invented, it’s more often than not identified as Canadian.
Tilley’s hats are so durable and practical that they’re guaranteed for life. And Canadians have trusted that guarantee with increasing support over the decades since the hat was first introduced in 1980.
A one-of-a-kind hat for the true Canadian sailor
Few realize that the classic hat, created by the avid sailor, was born essentially out of frustration. Tilley was looking for a hat that wouldn’t blow off his head as he sailed and, if it should take off with the winds, would float until it was retrieved.
I personally met Tilley when he would come to my then-retail outlet in Winnipeg, where we sold those iconic hats by the thousands. He would occasionally visit stores like ours to do hat signings, donating dollars to charity for each hat signed, new or old. He and his wife, Canadian sculptor Hilary Clark Cole, decided to spend a weekend with my wife and me in Ontario’s Sunset Country at my Sioux Narrows cottage on Lake of the Woods.
Not your typical Cottage Country
Tilley also has a cottage; his is in the Lake Muskoka district in Ontario. And though the Muskoka region is equally as impressive, both Alex and Hilary enjoyed experiencing the different kind of environment that Lake of the Woods presented them with.
One of the things they told us really stood out for them was the hugeness of Lake of the Woods, next in size to the Great Lakes, with 105,000 km of shoreline and over 14,000 islands. “Compared to Muskoka, Lake of the Woods is a wilderness,” Alex would say, and that it resembles what Muskoka must have looked like a century ago.
