Fans of the New Orleans Saints learned what kind of headgear they can buy to celebrate the 2019 NFL Draft. New Era designs and produces draft hats for every team, and this year chose to draw on local city and state flags for inspiration. You can see the full collection and read an interview with New Era’s director of football, Ryan DiNunzio, in this article from Jonathan Jones of SI.com. DiNunzio detailed the lengthy design process that went into creating this year’s draft hats, and every other edition:
“It’s roughly a 16-to-18 month process. Candidly we are already finalizing the concepts to send to clubs for draft 2020,” he explained. “We started roughly in November 2017, and sat down with our design staff and had an ideation session. From there they come with anywhere between eight and 16 concepts on paper and we’ll narrow it down to three or four and start prototyping those. And once really we get the physical samples of one or two teams, we start to dial in and say ‘this is what we thought in our minds and we want to bring this story to life.’”
For the hat specific to the Saints, check below or follow this link.
The three fleur-de-lis look is inspired by the New Orleans city flag, which is also printed inside the hat. New Era took that design further in the local colors variant, which incorporates the blue, white, and red bands (and yellow, not gold, fleur-de-lis) found on the city flag. The hats are available in both flat- and flex-brim styles, as well as fitted and adjustable sizes.
Reaction to these designs has been, well, divisive. Some fans swear “you have to be from there” to get it, while others suggest the idea comes from a good place, while the execution is lacking. The bar was maybe set too high in 2015, when New Era stitched line art unique to each city skyline on the bottom panel of each hat’s brim, which was extremely good.
What do you think? Will you be grabbing one of this year’s draft hats to represent the black and gold?
