I hate these hats!
A "you don't hate hats, you hate capitalism" type of situation
Note: This post may have too many images and links (so many citation links!) to appear in your email in full. You can read the whole thing on the Substack website or app.
Look at these hats.
The one on the left costs $550 USD. The one on the right goes for $5.971. And before I go any further, I want to clarify that I don’t hate the way these look. The tomato hat has an elongated shape that feels both playful and classy. The strawberry one has that curly little brim! Both are sweet and whimsical, and if I saw you wearing a hat that looked like this, I would be delighted. I would complement your style and ask you if you made it. But when I saw the luxury tomato hat in a Substack note2, along with its price, a wave of sticky revulsion washed over me. I wanted to follow that revulsion to its source, both in my personal biases and broader cultural attitudes towards handcrafts, labor, and luxury pricing.
The tomato hat on the left comes from Spanish legacy fashion house Loewe, which has been owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH since 1996. The hat is listed on luxury site mytheresa.com, where it’s described as “hand-crocheted in Italy from cotton3 yarn.” Later in the product description it says “Made in Spain,” though, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the country of origin. The hat is currently sold out. The strawberry hat is from Temu, so I guess it could be anything, but it’s listed as being handmade from acrylic yarn.
Doing the math
I don't know how to crochet, but a few weeks ago at my regular local craft night meetup, I asked some friends who do to do some back-of-napkin math on the cost of making a hat like the Loewe one. It's important to note that crochet is pretty much exclusively a handcraft4. So even a small piece like a novelty hat does require quite a bit of labor. So by rough estimate, the materials and labor costs could be:
$30ish for yarn (good stuff)
$50ish for labor. My friends thought it would take an experienced crocheter 3-4 hours, so I multiplied the upper estimate by the average Italian garment worker wage of $12.30/hour5.
So, $80. Again, verrrry rough. If we triple that to account for overhead and profit as this Marketplace piece suggests, we get $240. So certainly not $550, but that figure isn’t as bonkers as the markup rates of many items within the luxury space. And it’s nowhere near the level of class warfare rage bait as, say, this $1,650 The Row tee THAT YOU CANNOT WASH6.
$550 is also a much, much less ridiculous price that $5.97. The latter could conceivably cover the cost of cheap acrylic yarn, but not much else. Temu is, of course, famous for its almost farcically low prices and totally opaque supply chains.
Morally, I am much more offended by the cheap strawberry hat than the expensive tomato one, but the strawberry one didn't illicit the same ughh response as the tomato one. We're so awash in cheap, exploitative shit that it can feel impossible to muster outrage over every piece of it. And interestingly, both strawberry and tomato hats are unlikely to get much wear by the buyer, according to
’s recent report on closet usage:In general: higher the price tag, the more it’s been worn, with one key exception: clothing from luxury brands has been worn just 6 times on average, making luxury just as “fast” as fast fashion in practice.
But it’s more than the math
Perhaps the thing that initially bothered me about the Loewe hat, beyond the price tag, was that it doesn’t feel like a crocheted vegetable hat “belongs” to the luxury fashion market. If an adult wants to wear an Anne Geddes baby-esque hat, I think that’s beautiful, but they should have the decency to make it themself. Or get their mom to make it, or buy it at a craft fair, or at the very least seek it out on Etsy7. There’s just something that feels sad and gross to me about buying a high-price, status-branded folk object.
As someone at my craft night pointed out, it would actually be pretty sweet if a crochet artist was getting paid $500 a pop to make these tomato hats for rich people. I agree! I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, though I can’t be certain. Good on You, a ratings site that aggregates publicly available information on brands’ labor practices and sustainability, gives Loewe a 2 out of 5 on its “People” rating8. Maybe if LVMH’s press department ever responds to my email requesting more detailed information on the provenance of the hat, we will know for sure.
I will be the first to admit I do not always “get” luxury fashion, and it’s something that has made feel a little shy about diving into the fashion Substack universe, whatever that means. I am drawn to the artistry and drama of the runway, and love learning about the historical contributions and beefs of the major fashion houses. But scrolling through ready-to-wear luxury sites like mytheresa.com and SSENSE feels like looking through the window at a party I don’t want to go to.
At the same time, I realize that the designers behind these objects are playing a major role in shaping collective desire9 and the messy ebb and flow of trends. It’s hard to detangle my own taste and allegiance to DIY and secondhand fashion movements from what’s happening at the top of the heap. I mean, I’m familiar with the cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, for goodness sake! But also, like, fuck High Sport pants. Lots to unpack!
Loewe also released a tomato bag this spring that costs thousands of dollars, but for some reason it doesn’t bother me as much. Fancy little purses do belong to luxury and I even kinda like this one?? But I don’t actually want it, and would feel gross being seen out and about with it. So I guess I’m all over the place.
Anyway, get a load of these hats. Do you like them? Would you buy them? Would you make something similar?
Soon I’ll share some updates on recent sewing and altering projects, including the magic suit!
More or less. When I searched “temu crochet tomato bucket hat” I ended up with UK results, and changing the region required creating an account which I definitely wasn’t going to do, so I used the google currency converter to estimate the USD equivalent of the listed GBP price.
It was posted by Laura Reilly of Magasin without additional commentary, so I’m not sure if it was posted in appreciation or derision.
Specifically 98% cotton, 2% polyamide, according to bulleted description.
I say “pretty much” rather than “exclusively” because I found an absolutely beastly reddit thread about a crochet machine described in a 2023 paper, and have additionally seen people speculating in the comments on a TikTok I can't find anymore that in industrial settings, it might be possible to create something very reminiscent of crochet by making lace from cotton yarn on a water soluble backing fabric.
Or €11/hour, according to this source. If the product is instead made in Spain, it would be more like €9/hour, according to this source.
Allegedly.
I realize that Etsy is its own can of worms, and a lot of the prices for handmade items there also seem suspiciously low (though rarely Temu low). Etsy does have detailed standards on what constitutes “handmade,” but it seems commonplace for sellers to undervalue their labor to stay competitive on price. See also this interesting piece on why there are so many Etsy sellers in Ukraine.
Weirdly, the Loewe page on Good on You was 404ing when I went to grab the link, but I found a March 2025 version on the Wayback machine. These ratings aren’t perfect, and they often capture a lack of information rather than concrete evidence of harm, but brands with higher ratings tend to have greater transparency on labor practices.
It's always fun to examine our knee jerk reactions and gut feels of yes/no! I found myself agreeing with you on a few points and feeling surprised that I've never noticed that I felt that way before. Love the referencing too, more opinion pieces should do it!
Thanks for distilling all this, citations and all!