My family is Colombian, from Medellín, in the department of Antioquia. I never actually grew up there, because we moved around for work, so Colombia was the place we flew back to a few times a year rather than the place we lived.
Every one of those trips ended up the same way, out of the city and into the countryside near Fredonia, a coffee town south of Medellín, at my uncle's farm.
What those trips actually looked like
Out there you were in the dirt and the mud, sweating right alongside the adults instead of being kept out of the way, which was not how most of the rest of my life ran. I rode horses on that farm with my dad and my uncle when I was a kid, and at the time it was just what you did on a Saturday out of the city.
Then the visits got thinner for a while. That happens with a place you only ever fly into, where you are there for a week and then you are back at your normal life, and you can lose the thread of it without ever deciding to. Nobody in my family made a decision to stop going out to Fredonia as often. It just went that way for a stretch of years.
The wedding that brought it back
Earlier this year my cousin got married, to a great guy, and they held it at my uncle's farm in Fredonia. It put all of us back on the exact ground I had learned to ride on, which had not happened in years and is really what got me back in touch with that place and that side of the family.
My cousin's husband is the one on the horse in the photo on the cap. I took that picture at the farm during the wedding, with the horse standing in front of a blue wall that had bougainvillea hanging over the top of it, while he put it through its paces for everyone watching, and I have video of it too. A Paso Fino has this high step when it moves, almost a march, a little stomp with some attitude behind it. I had seen the breed my whole life on those trips and never once thought about putting it on anything until I was standing there with my phone out.
Why this is the first cap named after home
Côte, Nixon and Ovals all came first, and every one of them is named for somewhere I went. This is the first one named after home. When I picture Colombia and my family there, this is exactly what I picture: being on the farm, having a drink, actually relaxed, disconnected from the world, around animals, eating well, surrounded by people who make you laugh without trying.
I have taken hundreds of photos on those trips over the years, and most of them are landscape shots that could be anywhere in Antioquia. This one has a person in it who is now part of the family, on a horse, on that ground, on a day everyone was there.
What ended up on the cap
It is tan cotton with the details picked out in royal blue, and the blue came straight off the background of that photo, the wall the horse was standing in front of. I honestly was not sure about tan with royal blue until I had one in my hands, and then it worked. The patch on the front is a hand-painted oil painting of the rider on the Paso Fino, dye-infused into the patch so the whole painting shows, then given a 2D embroidered satin-stitch contour and stitched onto the crown. There are embroidered stars on the crown beside it, a small Colombian flag at the back next to the Crown Gate logo, and raised rubber lettering down the wearer's right side that reads Paso Fino.
The rest is the build we always use: soft full-panel cotton, a structured crown, a curved brim, and an adjustable snapback, one size fitting around 59 cm. If you have worn one of ours before, it will feel like the same hat with a different story on the front.
The Paso Fino cap is in stock now at $65. If you want the production side of it, how a photo like that turns into a patch you can actually wear, I wrote about that here, and the launch post covers the finished cap itself.
