The Hat We Made for Pope Leo XIV

On the evening of June 10, 2026, in Barcelona, a Spanish rock band handed Pope Leo XIV a cowboy hat. It was built by hand in our atelier. This is the story of how it got there, what's hidden inside it, and why a hatmaker who never imagined this moment now can't stop thinking about it.

A Pope in Spain, a band on stage, a hat in a box

Some context, because the moment deserves it. Pope Leo XIV's visit to Spain in June 2026 was the first papal trip to the country in fifteen years the last was Benedict XVI in 2011. The itinerary ran from Madrid to Barcelona to the Canary Islands, and it carried weight beyond protocol: Leo XIV became the first pope in history to address the Spanish parliament, and on June 10 he celebrated Mass at the Sagrada Família, blessing its newly completed Tower of Jesus Christ the addition that made Gaudí's basilica the tallest church in the world, in the same year Barcelona marks the centenary of Gaudí's death.

That night, after the vigil events, the band Siloé met the Pope in private. Siloé is one of the most interesting stories in Spanish music right now: three musicians from Valladolid, Fito Robles, Xavi Road and Jaco Betanzos whose name comes from the biblical pool of Siloam, where a blind man washed his eyes and saw. They've gone from university classmates to selling out arenas, with their latest album, Terrorismo Emocional, released just a month before the papal visit. They performed at the vigil. And when the music ended, they gave the Pope two gifts: their new record, and a hat.

Not any hat. A one-of-a-kind piece, designed and built by Genis Whylan at Why Hats, made for one head on Earth.

Genis wasn't in the room when it happened. He found out the way the rest of us did through the photos and the messages flooding in. His reaction, as he told the Spanish press: he never would have imagined a Pope holding a Why Hats piece in his hands. More than a professional milestone, it felt like years of work, effort and obsession condensed into a single image.

Why a Cattleman

Every custom piece in this atelier starts with the same question: who is this for? Strip away the title, and Pope Leo XIV is Robert Francis Prevost born September 14, 1955, at Mercy Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. The first US-born pope in two thousand years of Church history. A man who grew up in the Midwest, who is famously a Chicago White Sox fan, who once made headlines by wearing a Sox cap at the Vatican, breaking the unwritten dress code with a smile.

So the silhouette chose itself. The base of the hat is a Cattleman the most classic crease in American hatmaking. Tall crown, one center dent, two side dents. It's the shape ranchers wore, the shape that built the visual language of the American West. For a pope born in Chicago, a European atelier building the great American hat shape was the right kind of conversation: two traditions meeting in one object.

There's a quiet irony in it that we like. The cowboy hat is, in its origins, an immigrant's invention shaped by European felting traditions carried across the Atlantic and adapted to the American frontier. A Catalan workshop sending a Cattleman back across the ocean, to an American who now lives in Rome, closes a strange and beautiful circle.

What's in the hat

Genis didn't want to deliver an accessory. As he explained when the story broke: the goal was a piece with identity, meaning and a story of its own. That's the standard for every commission that leaves this atelier the Pope's hat simply had more story to carry than most.

Three details define it.

The cross. Engraved by hand on the front of the crown. Genis drew on the form of the mitres the Pope wears in ceremony the liturgical headwear with roots going back nearly a thousand years. It's also Siloé's personal emblem, the symbol the band has carried since their beginnings. One engraving, two meanings, and you only see it when you're close. That discretion is deliberate. We don't shout symbols; we bury them where they belong.

The lining. Open the hat and Barcelona is inside. The interior lining carries an illustration of the Sagrada Família the basilica where, hours before receiving the hat, the Pope had celebrated Mass under Gaudí's columns. Wherever this hat travels, the city that made it travels too. Hidden linings are one of our oldest habits: the outside of a hat belongs to the world, the inside belongs to the person wearing it.

The pick. Worked into the hatband: a guitar pick from Siloé. The band didn't just deliver the hat — they made the whole thing possible. They built the bridge between a Catalan workshop and the Vatican, and they played the music that framed the moment. Their pick, stitched into the band, means the hat carries its own messengers with it. The Pope also received the band's name in another form: "León XIV" applied to the piece, so there would never be any doubt who this hat was built for.

The press also reported what happened when he received it. The Pope, visibly tired after one of the longest days of his Spanish tour, broke into a spontaneous smile. For an object built to be felt before it's worn, there's no better review.

Faith, perseverance and Barcelona

Asked to define the piece in three words, Genis didn't hesitate: faith, perseverance and Barcelona.

He means faith in the workshop sense as much as the spiritual one. Faith is what keeps a self-taught hatmaker at the bench when the first attempts are disasters. It's believing in the work before anyone is paying attention, before any artist wears your hat on stage, before any of it makes sense on paper. As Genis put it: that faith is what carried a hat from a small Catalan atelier into the hands of a pope — something he couldn't have imagined a few years ago.

Perseverance is the part nobody photographs. Thousands of hours of steaming, blocking, burning and sanding felt. Hats that failed. Techniques invented because nobody would teach them.

And Barcelona is the anchor. The atelier sits in its orbit, under the silhouette of Montserrat, and the city's fingerprint is literally sewn inside this hat. Gaudí built a basilica that took more than a century and is still being finished. We build hats that take days and are meant to last decades. Different scales, same idea: do it by hand, do it right, let the work outlive you.

Popes and hats: an older story than you'd think

Here's something the photos of that evening don't tell you: the papacy has one of the richest headwear traditions of any institution on Earth.

There's the mitre, the tall, cleft ceremonial hat that inspired the cross on our piece — worn by bishops and popes for roughly a millennium. There's the zucchetto, the small white skullcap Leo XIV wears daily. There's the saturno, a wide-brimmed sun hat named after the planet because of its ring-like brim functionally, the closest thing the Vatican ever had to a cowboy hat. There was the papal tiara, the triple crown, last worn by Paul VI in the 1960s before it was set aside. And there's the camauro, a red velvet cap trimmed in white fur, dormant for decades until Benedict XVI revived it one winter in 2005 and half the world's press compared him to Santa Claus.

In other words: a pope receiving a serious, symbolic, handmade hat is not a novelty. It's a return to form. Headwear has marked papal identity for a thousand years. What's new is the shape and the fact that this one came out of a custom atelier rather than an ecclesiastical tailor. Even Chicago got there first, in its own way: the White Sox once handed out mitre-shaped "Pope hats" to fans in honor of their most famous supporter. A Cattleman from Barcelona feels like the natural next chapter.

What this means for a two-hands atelier

We make a finite number of hats a year. There's no factory behind the curtain, no second workshop, no licensing deal. One maker, one bench, fire and felt. When you work that way, you accept that your hats will travel further than you do to stages, to film sets, and now to the Vatican.

The Pope's hat was built with exactly the same process as every commission that comes through our door. The conversation first: who is this person, what do they carry, what should the hat say when they're not speaking. Then the felt, the block, the steam, the flame, the engraving, the lining, the finish. The only difference was the destination.

That's the part we want to be honest about, because it's the part that matters if you're thinking about your own piece: there is no "papal edition" process. There's one process. It produced a hat for Johnny Depp with a Picasso hidden in the lining. It produced this Cattleman with the Sagrada Família hidden in the crown. It will produce whatever your story requires.

The hat is in Rome now, or wherever the Pope's luggage goes. Genis is back at the bench. There are commissions waiting, and the felt doesn't care who wore the last one.

But for one evening in Barcelona, a hat from this workshop made a tired man smile and that's the entire job description of this craft, fulfilled at the highest level we can imagine.

Every Why Hats piece is designed around one person and built by hand by Genis Whylan. Custom commissions from €690. Start yours by telling us your story.