Taking care of your hat follows the same principle as taking care of your clothes. They don’t get dirty as often as clothes but they get dirty with wear, so you have to wash and clean them if you want to get the best out of them. If you have a dirty hat and you’re not sure on how to clean it, then our first tip for you would be to look at the label: If your hat has a tag, make sure to read the washing instructions. If there is no information on the tag then here are a few tips to help:

Stains

Cleaning a hat by hand: Add a mild detergent to cold water, start off with just using a section of the hat to clean first before putting the whole hat under. If there are any stains, use a stain remover to rub on those sections and let set for 5-10 minutes. If you don’t think it’s necessary to wash the whole hat, then you can just use a wet wipe or a wet flannel to wipe off any excess detergent and leave it in a well ventilated area to air dry. If the whole hat is dirty and there hasn’t been any colour of the hat coming off into the water or damage to the hat, then you can soak the whole thing for a good 45 minutes. Then all you have to do is rinse the hat off and air dry it. Don’t put it out in the sun as the sun can potentially make the hat fade.

Cleaning a hat using a washing machine: To start off with, it is best to pretreat the areas that have stains on them with a stain remover. You can then put it in the machine but it is best to put it in a garment and make sure you use cold water on a soft cycle. Then once again all that is left to do is let the hat dry.

Dust

If your hat gets dusty or bits of fluff or dirt on it, it is super easy to clean off using a lint brush or even tape. With the lint brush you can brush over the hat on the outside as well on the inside. You may find that there are bits in the creases that you just can’t get to and that is where tape will come in handy. Just grab a bit of tape, wrap it around your fingers and dab it on and off the hat to get everything off. 

Now that you know how to clean your hat, it is also important that you know how to store your hat. There are so many different ways you can keep your hat clean and like brand new. For example, you can store your hat in a plastic bag, a box or even a basket. If you don’t want it to get squashed, store it on a shelf or on a wall hook where other things aren’t going to get thrown on top of the hat. One last bit of advice, is that there are also many hat places that probably have spare polystyrene or plastic hat blocks/heads that you can get to put underneath your hat to keep it in shape. Below is a bad example of where to leave your hat: