Handmade hats.
Since 1855.
Guerra 1855 is Italy's oldest hat-making company still in business, founded in 1855 in Borgosesia, a Piedmontese municipality part of the then Kingdom of Sardinia. 170 years after its founding, the Guerra family continues to handcraft hats of all kinds in its workshop in beautiful Valsesia, marketing its designs through the historic Borgosesia store, a well-established network of selected retailers and a website capable of serving customers from all over the world.
Our Story
The history of Guerra 1855 begins in mid-19th-century Italy, still divided among several mutually independent states. The chronicles of Borgosesia, a town in Valsesia particularly rich in flourishing industries, report the presence in the area of several artisans dedicated to the production of hats, among whom the surnames Zenone, Ratti and Gugliermina stand out. It was the latter who founded our company in 1855, employing 15 employees skilled in hat making (at that time almost exclusively by hand). In the following decades, the company was taken over by Antonio Tabozzi, who specialized in the creation of priest's hats, and then was finally purchased towards the end of World War II by Giuseppina Prino, an employee of the hat factory, and her husband Livio Guerra.
In the mid-1900s the Guerra hat factory created almost exclusively men's felt hats, a type of headwear that dominated the company's production for several years. In the decades that followed, the felt in Guerra 1855 hats was joined by other high-value materials, such as cashmere, alpaca, and versatile and innovative technical fabrics. After progressively introducing more and more modern and high-performance machinery within the production process, in 1966 Livio Guerra won the call for bids issued by the ASCI (Italian Catholic Scouts Association, now AGESCI) for the standardized production of scout hats in Italy, beating the likes of Borsalino and considerably opening its market abroad as well. In 1983, Pier Luigi Guerra, Livio's son who took over the management of the hat factory, decided to officially register the Guerra 1855 brand, investing in the creation and diffusion of a corporate identity that would highlight the enormous experience in the field of handcrafted hat production, handed down by several generations of artisans over more than a century of activity.
Under the leadership of Pier Luigi, joined today by his daughters Valentina, Alissa and Patricia, our hat factory has specialized in the production of the highest quality handcrafted hats of a variety of types, produced entirely and proudly in Italy. Among our most celebrated collaborations are those with the likes of Worth & Worth (New York), Paul Smith (New York), Lock & Co. (London) and Aurora (Tokyo), while as distributors for Italy over the years we have partnered with brands such as City Sport, Willi, Kangol and Betmar.
What makes us unique
The use of fine raw materials from different countries of the world and an original production process that also involves the use of ultrasonic sewing machines make Guerra 1855 a reference brand for the most prestigious national and international hat makers, who have been commissioning the company for decades with models intended for a very high target of customers, including major film productions, famous personalities from the world of entertainment and extremely demanding collectors. We understand the hat as a "felt sculpture," which is delicately shaped by skilled and experienced hands. In addition to the same passion and experience of the master hatters who founded and ran the company for more than a century and a half, today we can harness the necessary technologies to produce hats with water-repellent felts and fabrics and the now famous Cashmere-Felt, the highest quality cashmere felt hat whose secrets we jealously guard.
Notable wearers of Guerra 1855 signature hats include Dwight Eisenhower, François Mitterrand, Bill Clinton, Prince William, Pope Francis, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, and Carolyn Smith, among others.
Our future
Throughout its long history, Guerra 1855 has never stopped investing in the future by relentlessly experimenting with ever stronger and higher performance techniques and materials to meet the multiple needs of contemporary generations, who are less and less used to "tolerating" the bulkiness represented by a hat. After several decades of research and development, the registration of multiple patents and the launch of the world's first non-deformable scout hat, we are ready to produce any type of hat in a flexible version, able to be folded, crushed and put in a bag and resume its original shape in a very short time without undergoing any kind of alteration. This unique manufacturing process represents a real revolution in the industry and can make even the bulkiest and notoriously delicate hats much easier to transport and store, while eliminating any fear of wear and tear.