It's hot out there. Really hot. The way summer is supposed to be.

In southern cities like Washington, that means people have already shifted into the easygoing, slow-walking fugue that's the only way to cope with a heat that slows your mind and saps your ambition.

It also means that, according to the Rules of the International League of Guys (don't try looking it up, you either know about it or you don't), it is now OK to be seen in outfits that would just look silly any other time of year: seersucker, linen, shoes with no socks, etc.

Here in the American South, some men can't wait: They are off the mark by the last Monday in May, which The Rules stipulate as the first permissible day to go all summery.

From time to time, I see Trent Lott, the Mississippian, former Senate majority leader, strolling around near my office, happily decked out in pastels and cotton.

Total hatters: Queen Elizabeth gestures beside husband Prince Philip, in his summer Panama, before the 151st running of the Queen's Plate horse race in Toronto in July 2010. (Fred Thornhil/Reuters)

Others, like President Barack Obama, just can't bring themselves to go for it, no matter what the temperature.

In his case, that probably has something to do with his unearthly ability to appear dry and cool, even in a dark wool suit. While the people surrounding him at announcements melt from the inside, faces ruddy and wet, perspiration stains pooling under their jackets.

But there is one summer-permissible item you don't see that much anymore, even here, which is too bad.

Because a Panama hat — the real thing, I mean, not the crappy look-alike stuff that seems to be dominating the flashy hipster shops these days — is modern art.

Montecristi

I wear one, having been convinced by a dermatologist that after a hatless five years in the pitiless Middle East sun, my glabrous scalp must at all times be covered when outdoors, as a matter of continuing good health.

Mine is a real Panama. It's from Ecuador, more specifically from a village near Montecristi, a town in the north.

A top-quality Montecristi is feather-light, so tightly woven its complexion is creamy, even viewed up close. Its smell, sweet and sulphury, never seems to disappear, nor does an aficionado want it to.

There is perhaps no item of clothing as cool, or as elusive, as a Montecristi hat.

But like so many other beautiful things, it's the product of drudgery. Of harvesting paja toquilla straw in the jungle, boiling it and separating its strands.

Then the excruciating process of weaving, the weaver bent over a stump, squinting and ruining his eyes, crossing the strands tens of thousands of times as the hat builds.

A year on a hat

The best of the best are constructed from straw the consistency of dental floss, with well over two thousand weaves per square inch.

Such a hat resembles fine linen and can easily consume a year of the weaver's time, working three hours or so a day.

The hat passes from one specialist to another as it's woven, ironed, bleached, pummeled, "back-woven" to bind the edges, shaped with steam and, finally, fitted with a ribbon and a sheepskin sweat band.

The best ones end up on the heads of the rich. Actors, in particular, seem to like them.

A good Montecristi will set you back at least a few hundred dollars, but the crème-de-la-crème ultrafino can easily fetch several thousand.

One Chicago hatter is asking $20,000 for the best one on his shelves.

FDR-style

Former U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt possessed an ultrafino and wore it to the Teheran Conference in 1943. A hat purporting to be FDR's, ripped and rumpled, was put up for auction recently.

The image of the American president, in the midst of the Second World War, in a snappy Panama, shaped in the optimo style, with the seam running down the middle, popularized the look among well-dressed American men.

Winston Churchill had a Montecristi. So does the King of Sweden and the writer Tom Wolfe. But probably no one has ever worn a Panama hat better than Sean Connery, which shouldn't surprise anybody.

League of Guys: A Panama-wearing Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau watches Canada Day ceremonies on Parliament Hill on July 1, 1983 with his three sons Alexandre (Sacha), Justin and Michel. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

The only real problem with Panama hats is that the weaving families of Montecristi aren't much on international commerce. So middlemen have traditionally hogged most of the profit.

An ultrafino that fetches, say, $7,500 in Beverly Hills, and took months of a man's life to create, might earn the weaver a couple of hundred dollars.

Simon Espinal, reckoned by most to be the best weaver alive, and whose products are considered national treasures, lives in a breeze-block bungalow. He's not terribly poor, but he's not even close to well off, which he certainly should be.

And while Espinal has a son said to nearly equal his skill, most master weavers don't.

In fact, many of the sons and daughters of Montecristi, ever more aware of the outside world and its rewards, aren't terribly interested in ruining their eyes and their fingers for pittance wages.

End of the line

"There aren't as many great weavers as there used to be," says Robert Weber, an Indiana-based hat retailer known for lower markups than most. "There are maybe 20 or 30 now."

That's 20 or 30 to supply the entire world.

Don Manuel Alarcon, one of Weber's suppliers, is pushing 80, and his eyes now prevent him from the delicate job of beginning the weave — creating the quarter-sized crown from which the hat grows.

So he has someone else start it for him and then he finishes the hat by touch alone.

Meanwhile, Montecristi now has the internet, and the nearly obscene final markups on their famous hats are evident for everyone to see.

"They feel like they're helpless. They don't know what to do," says Weber.

The smart thing would be to take control of the marketing. But, as Weber says, "you can't change a culture. There is a hierarchy no one wants to disturb."

What's coming, though, is obvious. With the master weavers of Montecristi aging, and fewer apprentices stepping up to replace them, the law of supply and demand looms.

If a decent Montecristi is expensive now, it'll be moving into the realm of white truffles in the not-distant future.

As always, the Chinese are stepping into the breach. Their hats are quite a bit cheaper and, in some cases, are actually made of refined paper, not straw.

They look good from a distance. But they don't have the smell. Or the complexion. Or the stamp of approval from the International League of Guys.