Roduction process

By Aspa G. Xidakis

Aspa comes from Pelion, lives in Athens, travels to the Ecuadorian jyngle and designs unique Panama hats.

"You are in Cuenca Ecuador, the humid jyngle. You only hear birds and knives cutting palm trees. They carefully select them, rig them and load them on the donkeys... Loaded carriages roll towards the "factory"... I follow them. In front, a large area where the palm leaves are spread. Not of any palm that can be seen in European lands and gardens. Leaves of the Carludovica palmata palm, as I later learn. On the one hand, women and men boil the leaves in large barrels, on the other, young and old weave the palm leaves by hand, which slowly take the form of a hat. Inside the factory a single "machine" and an old man molds the hats. To give them shape and their visor.

These images won my heart and with a risk I decided to start the process of cooperation with the factory, with a single purpose, to bring the original Panama hats to Greece. The authentic Paja Toquilla. . "

Her name is Aspa Xydakis and she is a woman who loves to travel, listen to the sounds of nature, appreciate what the earth generously gives to man. She has a special relationship with fashion and style although she studied and wrote as a financial journalist. " 

Aspa, at the moment in the jungle of Ecuador, felt that what she experienced had to travel to Greece. 

"In Greece I design Panama hats and send them with the joy of a small child thousands of kilometers away, to Ecuador. That's where their construction takes place" 

And because creation has no borders, and she is a junter of the unique, she closed the deal and returned to Greece. And she began with tools deep knowledge, respect for nature and a mold of past decades equal to a thousand machines producing pret-a-porter collections.  

And Paja Toquilla  by Aspa G. Xidakis was born