History

Giuseppe Borsalino had spent time working in a Parisian chapellerie before returning to Alessandria in the early 1850s. He opened his workshop on 4 April 1857 in a building near the Tanaro river with a single apprentice and ambitions shaped by what he had seen in France: that a well-made felt hat could be both a luxury object and a mass-market product if the process were sufficiently systematised. The felt hat manufacturing technique that Borsalino refined — beginning with raw rabbit and hare fur, beaten and matted into felt, then shaped over wooden blocks through successive stages of steaming, blocking, and ironing — required up to 52 hand operations before the hat was finished. This labour intensity, which seemed to limit industrial scalability, turned out to be compatible with factory organisation because each operation required relatively little skill while the sum of them produced an object of consistent quality.

The company expanded rapidly: by 1870 it had moved to a large factory on Via Cavour, the long commercial street that bisects the historic centre of Alessandria. By 1900, the Borsalino factory was the largest single employer in the city. The hat was exported to Europe, the Americas, and the British colonies; Italian emigrants wore Borsalinos as symbols of dignity in Argentina, the United States, and Brazil, and the hat's association with successful Italian identity in the diaspora was one of the sources of its international prestige.

The twentieth century was a steady, then accelerating, decline: the abandonment of hat-wearing by men in the 1960s and 1970s collapsed the mass market, leaving only the luxury segment. Borsalino survived through repeated restructurings, ownership changes (including the Austrian Hatico group and the Luxembourg-based investor Philippe Camperio), and a bankruptcy in 2018 that nearly ended the brand. It was acquired by the Singapore-based businessman Haresh Aswani in 2019 and continues to produce in Alessandria.