Here is a Borsalino Bellagio, just like the one James Spader wears in "The Blacklist."

Conspiracy, intrigue and detective work are the foundation of the thrilling NBC show, “The Blacklist.” On it a hat-wearing ex-FBI agent played by James Spader is a most-wanted criminal who turns himself in. Looking for leniancy, he offers to use his underworld connections to capture a top terrorism suspect. Among his requests is one that he only work with a raw recruit just out of training. She is a profiler named Elizabeth Keen.

“The Blacklist” is a tense and thrilling show.

However, our main star is the hat James Spader wears. It is a black fedora with the brim snapped down in the front and up in the back.

We are 99.99% certain it is a Borsalino Bellagio. This is a very handsome men’s hat with a center dent crown. It’s double-tailed grosgrain bow band is a subtle flourish. Ours come with the rare lapel strap.

Made from a refined fur felt, the Borsalino Bellagio is a luxurious testament that proves “they” still make great hats in our modern world. Other great characteristics of note are the supple leather sweatband and the satin lining of the hat, both of which are there to help your hat last a long time.

We stock the Bellagio along with other great Borsalino hats at Hats Plus. Be sure to check them out, especially if you want to look like your favorite Hollywood stars such as James Spader and the many others we’ve profiled on Hollywood Hatties.

Hard plastic hat cases are a good way to travel with a prized hat that you don't want damaged in transit. A crushable fedora by Bailey is another good option for packing a hat without damaging it. Our hat cases come in large and small sizes. The mid-size one in this photo is really a large that has a tier removed to make it more photogenic.

A reader recently asked us to address the issue of traveling with hats. Yes, yes. No doubt there are some glib readers out there already firing up the comments section ready to deliver the punchline answer to today’s title…”with it on my head.”

However, serious hat-wearing travelers know that packing a favorite topper on a vacation or business trip can be fraught with peril. Crowns are easily crushed. Brims are easily distorted. Excessive sunshine, heat and moisture will shrink and warp your chapeau. Even a quick pit stop to fill the gas tank and check the oil might accidently transfer grease and grime from your car to your hat with one forgetful touch.

So, just how do you travel with a hat and keep it safe?

It all depends on the hat. The easiest thing to do might be to get a hat designed to be packed in luggage or a coat pocket. Guerra’s Falbatravel is a nice fur felt fedora that is specifically designed to be broken down and rolled up to fit in a coat pocket or suitcase. As soon as you need to wear it again, you can unroll it and pop it back into shape in fewer than 30 seconds. If you are a summer traveller who prefers a straw hat, Bailey’s Roll Up does the same thing.

Many of our Bailey wool felt hats are designed to be “crushable.” All you do is gently crush the hat from side to side. (Do not crush it from up and down because that will ruin it.) Then you can carefully place it in a suitcase. As with the Guerra, these hats pop right back into shape. As an added bonus, Bailey wool felt hats are almost all equiped with a rain repellent finish that that helps you to fearlessly brave a light rain or snow.

That said, if you have a favorite fur felt Stetson or sisol straw Borsalino you want to take with you—never, ever put it in a suitcase or duffle bag. These hats are best traveled with the original cardboard box in which it came. Hats Plus also sells special hat travel and storage cases. These sturdy, hard plastic cases with steel latches come in two sizes. One is a single hat case, that can sometimes hold two hats, depending on the height of their crowns and the large case holds up to 6 hats.

Packing a hat in one of these boxes or cases is fairly straight forward. If your hat has a snap brim, be sure to put it in the up position. This helps to minimize any warping of the brim while it is in storage. If you are stacking hats in the cases, they will likely all be the same hat size and can be placed gently one on top of the other. It is preferable if you have a 2” or 3” cardboard or styrofoam ring around the base of the crown to keep the hats from getting stuck together and/or crushing each other. If you are taking several different size hats, put the smaller hat sizes on the bottom and put them in ascending order. Think of the Russian nesting dolls; it will help keep all of the hats fitting together nicely.

The single hat case costs $50 and the large hat cases cost $125.

Okay. So you have limited space in your car or for luggage on a flight, and you still want to bring a nice hat that isn’t crushable, what do you do? First of all, never put it in an overhead compartment of an airplane because it will get smashed. If you are on a flight, just snap up the brim and keep it on your lap. If you are taking a cross-country roadtrip and don’t want to risk crushing it in the trunk, keep the brim up and lay it flat on an empty passenger seat. Try to keep it out of the sun and heat for long periods, especially if you’ve left the car parked with all of the windows up. That type of intense heat will eventually shrink your hat and possibly warp the brim. Bring it into your hotel room at night or wear it to the diner at lunch. If you drive a convertible with the top down, the wind might buffet the hat and send it flying, but if you have a conventional hardtop and AC, you’ll be fine.

I hope this helps with your hat traveling concerns. I love hearing from our readers, and if you have any other suggestions or topics you would like to see written, please send us a comment. Thanks!

Stetson's Andover gets a new two-tone color design this summer. Made of Milan straw, it is sure to be a crowd pleaser.

The straw hats are coming out from hibernation. Better, yet, the new arrivals are coming in, and we have some handsome devils to be proud of.

The ever-popular and charismatic Stetson Andover is coming in new two-tone color combinations, such as the black and cream milan straw beauty in the photo. Next to him is an all black, all straw Stetson Stratoliner! The best-selling felt hat now has a summer companion! For those who absolutely have to keep the sun off of them in the summer, the Stetson Rustic is made of thick palm leaves and ideal for blocking the sun’s harshest rays.

Dobbs has already sent us two new beauties for the summer, as well. These great hats are called the Dobbs Caruth, which is quite dapper, and the Dobbs Baroni, which is very colorful and exciting to wear.

Next comes the most resplendent of our early summer straw hat merchandise. It is the very thin, elegant and sporty Borsalino Sisol Pork Pie. When you wear it, you can’t help but look like a million bucks!

Here is the 2012 Borsalino Check Ivy Cap. It is one of the first dashing new caps to arrive for the fall season.

School has started. Football has started. I know. It is sad to say, but summer’s days are numbered and running out fast.

The good news is that it will soon be time to pick out your new hats for the autumn and winter!

At our Chicago location, we are turning over the store and readying our wool caps and fur felt hats.

Among our first new arrivals of the season are a beret and Check Ivy Cap from Borsalino. Each is hand-crafted by those Italian artisans whose work is admired the world over.

All you need to do to fall in love with Borsalino’s berets is touch them. Each is luxuriantly soft and features an equally soft leather sweatband. The wool is warm, and they are designed for both men and women to wear.

The Check Ivy Cap isn’t done any justice in the photo. It is darker in real life and the burnt yellow checks on a dark brown background, as well as the blue checks on a black background, are absolutely electrifying.

More hats and caps are coming soon, so be sure to check in with our store or website often to see what else has arrived.

To get your hat size, measure the circumference of your head in inches and divide by pi.

That’s a span of roughly 5 inches, a big difference. So how do people determine a hat size, and why does it seem to fall in such a narrow range of numbers?

The official way to get your hat size in the United States is to measure the circumfrence of your head to the nearest eighth of an inch. Then you divide by pi (3.14). This will give you your official hat size. Every increase in hat size is 4/10ths of an inch.

Store owner Martin Mann said that the smallest adult size hat Hats Plus carries is 6 5/8.

Referring to the largest hat size he’s seen on a customer, manager Tod Canon said, “8 ¼ is the biggest we’ve seen here.”

Mann explained that when dress hats were more commonly worn, hatters made hats in sizes that better fit head shapes called “round,” “oval” and “long oval.” As not every head is shaped the same way, this provided better fits within the same measured size.

Just to make the matter more confusing, there is no universal hat sizing. In the United Kingdom, their sizes are one size smaller than ours. So if you walk into Christie’s to buy a bowler and tell the clerk you’re looking for a 7 3/8, it won’t fit. He’ll sell you a 7 ¼ that fits perfectly.

The French have their own system that designates sizes from zero to 9 ½ . The rest of Europe tends to stick with simply measuring the circumference of your head in centimeters. That is why your City Sport cap (from Belgium) and your Borsalino fedora (from Italy) list their hat sizes in centimeters.

This season Hats Plus will continue to carry those great chapeaus, but we are also extremely proud to announce the arrival of 2 new Borsalino designs inspired by these same hats!

With this blog post we proudly introduce the Amalfi Panama Hat and the Cuenca Fino Pelles Panama Straw Fedora!

Each hat is intricately made with extremely light-weight straw hand woven in Ecuador. It is then blocked and finished at the hands of the fine hatters of Borsalino in Italy.

Based on the crowns of last season’s biggest sellers, these two hats offer the extremely popular and youthful trend of shorter brims!

Look cool. Stay cool…all with the masculine elegance of Borsalino.

Check out the smokin' hot new diamond crown fedora by Borsalino!

Leave it to Borsalino to show how it is done. Its new diamond crown fedora is heads and shoulders above the rest.  Available in black and grey, this fur felt beauty also stays on top of the stingy brim trend. It is ideal for making the scene both in the club and at work. It truly is in a class all of its own.

To learn more about it click here to go to the Hats Plus website or visit the shop in Chicago and try one on today!

Fresh from the Emerald Isle come the handsome County Tweed Ivy, Houndstooth Plaid Ivy, Irish Herringbone Gatsby and Herringbone Ivy Cap. Each cap is made of wool and features a satin lining.

The craftsmen and women at Borsalino offer up a very refined Doria Newsboy Paperboy. This Doria is made of a soft cashmere-wool blend  and is satin-lined for your comfort.

Hats known as boaters or skimmers were all the rage in 1908 when this photograph was taken at a summer picnic for the Carnegie Corporation. As there was little relief from the heat, these straw hats were critical for helping to keep the sun off.

They might not have had global warming to contend with yet, but it was hot. Just look at this picture from Carnegie’s 2^nd Annual Company Picnic in 1908. It is the middle of summer, on a day meant for fun, and the men are wearing suits while the ladies are wearing several layers of /under their dresses. And it wasn’t as if they could all go inside to cool off. Air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet!

Perhaps because they couldn’t go inside to cool off, hats took on an even greater importance for providing both shade and making a fashion statement.

This is a straw boater, which is still a surprisingly popular selling hat today.

For men, this was an era dominated by the boater, also known as the skimmer. This was a flat-topped straw hat that was light weight with a goodly sized brim. These days those hats are difficult for many people to pull off without looking anachronistic. However, back then, a boater and a seersucker suit made any man the toast of the town. And you had better start off the day with your suit coat on, even if it was 95 degrees and humid.

Today, the boater sells surprisingly well. Admittedly, most of the people looking for them want them for theater and film projects, but still every now and again we come across a few men who can really rock a boater in style. Are you one of them? Please write in and tell us about your favorite summer hat.

The Hat Whisperer enjoys Boralino's C-Straw for a great summer fedora.

This year Edwin favors the Borsalino C-Straw.

“I like the teardrop style and the band,” Edwin said. “It’s one of the only hats I like with a smaller brim.”

It is a highly functional hat, too.

“It’s a casual hat that dresses up nicely,” Edwin added.

See one for yourself at Hats Plus.