We bought Hugh Hendry’s £81 hat and can confirm: it’s a hat

Fund management isn’t an obvious route to fame. Fortune, sure. Being a fund manager and getting rich is as difficult as being a lifeguard and getting wet.

Fame, however, demands being unusual. It might require being unusually good and/or unusually bad at the money stuff, though there’s an accelerant available from being unusual in some other way — perhaps by being a woman, or a criminal, or a self-styled mystic of markets, or an oddball.

In fund-management terms, Hugh Hendry is moderately famous. That’s based partly on his Eclectica hedge fund’s good performance through the 2008 crash, but is mostly because of his colourful personality that has outlasted his knack for making money.

During the GFC and its aftermath, Hendry’s caustic way with words had made him a top choice for media bookers. Pithy, contrarian doom entertained TV audiences more than Eclectica clients, however. After erratic returns during the whatever-it-takes years, the fund was wound down and Hendry disappeared from public view.

Then came the reinvention. The 53-year-old Glaswegian first resurfaced in 2020 with a YouTube video in which he skateboards around Paris delivering monologues about absurdism.

Hendry had by this time moved to the Caribbean island of St Barts — to be a “luxury hotelier, investor and surfer“ according to his Instagram profile — where he found a second wind as a macroeconomic beat philosopher under the sobriquet of The Acid Capitalist. “The important thing was I stopped hiding and I opened myself up to ridicule or otherwise,” he told The Times in 2020.

Desire for ridicule or otherwise has led to a podcast, a Substack and a range of merchandise. Hendry recently released a “first edition acid cap” in association with Pixel Gallery, a Brighton artspace and giclée printer that has pivoted abruptly into hats.

“I would recommend you panic and buy your hat before they are going, going, gone,” writes Hendry. “Hats are produced in very limited quantities and the demand has been overwhelming.”

That was all the encouragement we needed.

Have you really paid £81 for a hat?

Yes. Postage and packaging were free.

What makes the hat worth £81?

Difficult question. What makes anything worth anything? All we can tell you is that it’s a classic 100-per-cent polyester snapback trucker hat made by the Chinese brand Yupoong that has HUGH HENDRY embroidered into the poly-cotton front panel. The stitching’s quite robust.

Can you claim the cost back on expenses?

It seems unlikely.

Do Yupoong hats usually cost £81?

The same base hat is on sale via Amazon for £9.06, meaning Hendry’s endorsement carries a retail markup of £71.94. It’s therefore reasonable to conclude that the Acid Capitalist brand has an intangible value equivalent to up to 794 per cent of tangible costs. That’s quite a punchy ratio, putting Hendry in the same league as super-luxury brands like Hermès.

Was the hat made in St Bart’s, Brighton or China?

The label says Bangladesh.

Is it a nice hat?

It’s ok, as hats go. A bit wide and high at the crown. The brim’s very stiff and the shell’s unapologetically plasticky. It’s certainly a statement piece, though to most people the statement probably won’t be “that person has paid £81 for a hat”.

What do you know about fashion anyway?

Fair question. That’s why we also asked Jo Ellison, editor of HTSI.

Without really knowing who Hugh Hendry is, I would say the cap is kind of clever. It’s a way of tapping into the current merch trend, where every pizza restaurant, sports club and beauty label has got a tee-shirt to self-promote, and it’s an ironic nod towards modern fashionability. It also has the cachet of that clubbable, insider-y thing that presumably people who spend a lot of time in luxury hotels in St Barts want to brag about. The fact that it’s most likely manufactured in less than savoury conditions from cheap, non-environmentally friendly materials is a missed opportunity. Having said that, looking at the guy’s Instagram, he looks like a rabid megalomaniac who lives for this kind of analysis . . . 

Is Hugh Hendry really a rabid megalomaniac who lives for this kind of analysis?

We’ll find that out by whether or not he retweets this story.

What’s going to happen to the hat?

It’ll be among the prizes when Alphaville gets round to organising another pub quiz. The role of quizmaster has not yet been cast so if Hendry wishes to be considered, he is encouraged to get in contact.