Tirabasso

The hat as a language

The hat factory’s store room with shelves of wooden blocks and stacked hats

Client

Tirabasso

Programme

Expression

Services

Research & positioning

Art direction

Photography

Film & documentary

Generative imagery

Year

2025 — 2026

Tirabasso makes hats for luxury maisons. The problem wasn’t quality: it was that the value never left the workshop.

The starting point

A manufacturer is invisible by construction: its name never appears on the object. Yet at the very moment luxury goes back to telling craft as its most authentic language, staying invisible stops being neutral and becomes a position lost.

The direction

Two registers, held together. On one side the factory documented in black and white — the place, the machines, the hands shaping the straw — proving the craft without narrating it. On the other four campaigns built with generative imagery, taking the hat into worlds that could not have been produced otherwise. The first register supplies the proof, the second the desire: together they move Tirabasso from supplier to partner.

The deck

Tirabasso — Visual manifesto and campaign

Request it →

The hat factory

The place and the people, shot in black and white with no staging: the stacked blocks, the steam, the hands shaping the straw. It is the proof everything else rests on.

Worker at the steam press, a cloud of steam above the machine

Black hat pressed onto a block, the worker’s hands on the machine

Two hands shaping a straw hat on a block, the only colour image in the series

Portrait of a man speaking while holding a document, among the workshop blocks

Worker guiding a hat under the sewing machine

Sign reading Cappellificio Tirabasso Serafino above a machine’s dials

Man standing between two machines, workshop with windows onto greenery

Hands adjusting a machine mechanism, close detail

Office portrait in front of an aerial photograph of the plant

Worker feeding an orange straw brim into the press

01 / 11

The making

The gesture shot close, at the right distance. It proves the craft without having to narrate it.

Generated image: figure in pale overalls and a straw hat inside the store of hat blocks

Generated image: wide black hat among shelves of hats and coloured ribbons

01 / 05

The generative campaigns

Four worlds built with generative imagery — green, flower, desert, abstract — held together by a single grammar: the figure small in the field, colour as both backdrop and subject, the hat as the only constructed presence.