Kangol 504

The 504 is a small flat cap without a seam. It is knitted in wool, then pulled over a hat block and set, so that the crown comes out as one smooth rounded piece sloping forward onto a short, stiff peak about four and a half centimetres deep. There are no panels and no button on top; the only decoration is a small embroidered kangaroo at the centre of the back. The number is simply the number of the block it was shaped on.

Kangol began as a beret maker. Jacques Spreiregen, born in Warsaw and settled in London, had imported Basque berets since 1918, and in 1938 he opened a factory in a former flax mill at Cleator in Cumbria to make his own. Kangol berets went to the forces in the Second World War, most famously to Montgomery, and to the British Olympic team in 1948. In 1954, the company says, someone gave the beret a stiffened peak, and the result was its first cap.

That cap travelled further than the beret. The company supplied the Beatles' caps in the 1960s and made its name in America in the following decades, where customers asked for it by the animal on the label until, in 1983, Kangol made the kangaroo its logo. In the 1980s Kangol hats became a fixture of hip-hop, and the 504 has been worn forwards and backwards ever since.

The making has moved. Cleator closed as a factory in 2009, and the rights to Kangol hats now belong to Bollman, an American hatmaker, with hats made in Eastern Europe and the United States. The object has not changed: the Wool 504 that Kangol sells today is still a seamless knitted wool cap blocked into the same short, rounded shape, and the company still calls it the original Kangol cap.