Head of the Class
Two years ago, when Hatco--the Texas firm that creates Stetsons--advertised for help, they did so only with the vaguest plan of mustering new blood. Designer Gary Rosenthal, now entering his 70s, was hardly ready to retire. Although he’d launched each Stetson made for almost 30 years, working with an icon tends to energize a man. And Stetson--crown of ranchers, movie cowboys and weekend good old boys--has gleamed with legendary luster since the Civil War. Rosenthal allowed, though, that he’d like someone to do the legwork at the factory.
Meanwhile, Thomas Harris, Hatco’s president, was pondering Latino buyers, who had been loyal Stetson wearers from the company’s first days. Now, unlike other Stetson clients, they also were a growing population. By the 1990s, the cowboy hat business was what analysts politely term “mature.” In other words, the prospects for new buyers had dwindled. With the glory days of “Urban Cowboy” and Texophile Asian tourists long past, Stetson sales had flattened. But previews of the 2000 census showed that Latinos in the U.S. had increased by more than 50% in number.
It might be nice, mused Harris, to get a Spanish speaker on the team.
So Harris hired a young Mexican named Victor Cornejo. The skinny 22-year-old seemed bright. Raised in the slums of Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, he’ d worked his way through college in Texas. A nice kid, diligent enough to endure an entry-level job. But Cornejo did far more than just endure. He deluged his bosses with new designs and strategies, all adding a Latino tilt to the hallowed Texas hat. Within a year, he had revolutionized the company, lobbing sales upward 40%. Harris had hired a prodigy. A western-wear savant. A spy in the house of hats.
inside the stetson offices in garland, texas, each wall offers an ode to cowboy culture. Pristine, curvy Stetsons line the entry like gold discs at a record studio. Stills of Stetsoned film stars--John Wayne, James Stewart, Tom Mix--peer manfully along the halls. And greeting anyone who enters is Stetson’s Mona Lisa: “The Last Drop,” a sunset-colored portrait of a cowboy watering his horse out of his battered hat.
Downstairs, in a factory, hat blockers still shape Stetson bodies one by one. It’s much as they were made in 1865, when a sickly Philadelphia hatter named John B. Stetson first headed west to find his health. Intrigued by the Mexican cowboys, Stetson fashioned his own version of their headwear out of matted rabbit hide. A Mexican vaquero bought the ur-Stetson for $5. Mexicans also nudged Stetson fortunes ahead a generation later, during the Revolution: Pancho Villa is said to have bought thousands to outfit his army.
But in the generations after, it was Texans who identified with the hats most closely. In the Lone Star State, a “Stetson is tantamount to the crown of kings,” declares Will Howard, head of Texas history at the Houston Public Library. The brand’ s heft and profile, he explains, are simply unmistakable. It wasn’t parody, precisely, when Lyle Lovett hugged his Stetson in a recent CD photograph. When he sings, “You can have my girl, but don’t touch my hat,” Texans may smile at the excess. But they appreciate the sentiment.
Few people understand that sentiment as well as Gary Rosenthal. Lean and wry, still piqued by nuances of brim and felt, he knows hats as well as any man alive. That may be why Rosenthal so quickly recognized Cornejo’s talent. His new helper, Rosenthal explains, joined a designer’s moxie with cultural insight that sometimes dumbfounds his bosses.
Scarcely a year after joining Stetson, for example, Cornejo suggested a hat called La Guadalupana.”In Mexican agricultural areas,” he told his bosses, “they have a tradition of tucking a little image of the Virgin of Guadalupe for protection inside the hatband.”
Why not silkscreen her image right into the silk dome inside a Stetson’s crown?
True, the traditional Stetson is a stern affair, devoid of color even on the inside lining. But Mexicans find color perfectly compatible with the male aesthetic. So Cornejo and his mentor puzzled mainly about how to place the image most respectfully. “Talk about tasteful,” Rosenthal says. “We didn’t put our name anywhere near the picture.” La Guadalupana quickly became one of Stetson’s top sellers among Latino customers. Next, Cornejo came up with El Azteca. Mexicans, he says, tend to be nationalistic, relishing emblems of their heritage. Lined in blood-red silk and emblazoned inside with an Aztec calendar, El Azteca sold spectacularly.
Emboldened, Cornejo proposed a hat for cockfighting enthusiasts. Though definitely a niche market, cockfighters constitute an ardent subculture, Cornejo argued to his bosses. He sketched out an image of two roosters tangling, beak to beak, that would be printed on a gold silk interior. Then, worried about PETA activists, he resketched: the image now showed roosters, separated, fiercely staring each other down. And what if that picture reappeared on a tiny hatband medallion? This was not your father’s Stetson. But the company’s board members, watching the climb in Latinos sales, gulped and gave Victor their blessing. El Palenque, or The Cockfight Rink, became another hit.
the youngest of five children, victor cornejo grew up fatherless in Juarez’s most violent slum. Every day, along the bridge that stretched into El Paso, fragments of America rolled in. Clothes styles, music, tourists, the smell of Big Macs mingling with truck fumes. “What’s on the other side?” Cornejo once asked his mother.
“A big shopping mall,” she told him. “For rich folks.” Cornejo thought about it, and resolved that one day he’d cross that bridge as well. After high school, he applied to the University of Texas at El Paso, his grades earning him a scholarship that reduced his tuition to that paid by a Texas resident. The only problem was, he didn’t have the money of a Texas resident. That, and he didn’t speak a lick of English.
He muddled through, learning English as he studied. As for the money, he didn’t figure that out until October of his freshman year. Then he recalled that Halloween is sacred in the Juarez discos. Elaborate costume parties culminate each year in frenzied contests with cash prizes. Cornejo approached the contests like a job, devising an epic dinosaur costume and winning $3,500--tuition for a year. Each October he returned to Juarez with another killer costume. Contests paid his way through college.
Costumes were the closest thing to hat design that Cornejo did before coming to Stetson. But when he saw Stetson’s help-wanted ad, he knew he understood the product. In Juarez, aswirl with transients, garments plainly declare caste. Used clothes from the U.S. become the wardrobes of the border’s poor. Costume parties mainly are for kids with money: pampered Juarez “juniors,” or students from El Paso. And, especially for rural folk, Stetson hats have always symbolized arrival.
There’s a tradition, Cornejo says, around heading north to work. The first time you come home again, you bring a Stetson to the family patriarch. These hats do not come cheap, starting at about $100. But for Mexicans, a Stetson mixes the allure of the U.S. with the swagger of their own vaquero past. Think Ronald Reagan. Think the Bushes. Think Vicente Fox.
“It’s something that shows either you are powerful or you have money,” Cornejo explains. “Even after the first year in the United States, people bring a Stetson home. It’s like a postcard. You want to say, ‘I was there.’ ”
Cornejo did more than just arrive. Within months of his first entry in the hat-lined hall, he’d lassoed Stetson’s corporate identity. So dazzling is his track record that Cornejo is designing this season’s Latino line mostly himself. His salary’s improved--he won’t say by how much--although his job title is the same. His effect, says mentor Rosenthal, has been transformative. Today Latinos, mostly from Mexico, buy 65% of Stetson hats.
Today Cornejo is still skinny, but in a slate jersey shirt, immaculately pressed slacks and good shoes, he looks distinctly prosperous. His hair is cropped, his nails meticulous: the grooming of a man raised poor and with near-religious self-respect. Cornejo shyly reveals he has even become a celebrity in certain circles. After the Spanish-language network Univision featured a story on him, girls at a Tejano concert lined up, squealing for his autograph.
Yet even now, he wrestles with his bosses. “I’ll show them something, and they don’t know what it is,” he says. “Or because they’ re not part of the culture, they don’t know if it’s going to work or not.” Take the case of the Green Hat. “We’ve been introducing things like green felt,” says Cornejo. “The first time, they were like, ‘Who would wear a green hat?’ But it’s just a simple fact. If you look at Mexicans’ jeans, green is one of the colors they wear. They’ll wear green boots, green pants. I wear green myself.”
They will also, whether laborers or janitors or farm workers, pay dearly for the hats. “The hat is a status item,” Cornejo says. “Probably most Hispanics who wear hats don’t wear them because they work on a farm.” Instead, they wear them to dances and parties, and they want their prosperity read easily. That’s why Cornejo pioneered another detail: taking the printed “X” signs that denote a Stetson’s quality (the higher the percentage of fur in the felt blend, the higher the “X” designation) and making them external ornaments. A standard 4-X Western hat costs about $100 to $150. “The X designation is really valuable--the more X’s you wear, the more status you have,” Cornejo says. He reaches for a box not unlike a tuba case and flips the latch. “This is a 1,000-X hat,” he remarks, pulling out a chiseled, lushly rounded specimen in white. Tiny diamonds glitter from the buckle on its hatband.
To create this hat, Cornejo says, Stetson had to find a new way to process felt. In the past, if you tried to make a felt with this much chinchilla in it, the fabric would dissolve like heated butter.
“It retails for $5,000,” Cornejo says, poising the white hat on his 10 fingertips. “Basically, the market demanded it. Latino clients asked us, ‘Do you have any higher X’s?”’
And Stetson, now with Cornejo’s guidance, said, “Of course.”
