Chaptzem Blog!      

Bruno Lacorazza’s fur felt hats come in black, black or black.

But there the uniformity ends as Mr. Lacorazza, 47, Colombian-born hatter to the Lubavitch Hasidim and other Orthodox Jews who keep their heads covered, arrived in Brooklyn from Miami last week with cartons of exciting new styles retailing for about $125, along with the classics.

For Wolf Greenbaum of Feltly Hats in Williamsburg, Mr. Lacorazza pulled out a homburg, which is favored by many Hasidim — “pious ones,” in Hebrew. At first glance it looked like every other homburg, black and round. But Mr. Lacorazza had a surprise. “You see this finish?” he asked, running his hands over the fuzzy rabbit fur. It was, he announced, his new, more textured finish — “peach.”

Mr. Greenbaum was unmoved. But he liked Mr. Lacorazza’s next offering, a fedora with an asymmetrical “dimensional” brim. “But instead of three inches in the front and two and seven-eighths on the sides,” Mr. Lacorazza explained, “it’s two and three quarters on the sides!”

“This good, this leave,” Mr. Greenbaum conceded.

Mr. Lacorazza, in a white guayabera and one of his own black fedoras, wasn’t finished. “But you need to place me an order,” he said.

Black may be the new black (and the old black) in Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park. But if you thought that Hasidic hats all look the same — black brim, black crown, black band and bow — you would be wrong. Mirroring the subtle but significant differences among their Orthodox Jewish wearers, there are big differences in the hats when you know where to look, and last week Mr. Lacorazza, who visits New York a couple of times a year, pointed them out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/nyregion/10hats.html?ref=nyregion