The flat side of a (clean, of course) butter knife and a shot of water from a spray bottle (steam may or may not be better) often does the trick. With lighter colors of ribbon, you run the risk of leaving a "high-water" mark behind, so you may have to wet the whole ribbon to address that.
Now you know of at least one way not to store your hats.
I agree with carefully, fully wetting the ribbon so you don't see water marks, but with clean ribbons, this is less likely anyway.
Simply wetting and smooting with fingers, then allowing to dry usually works.
Also, I understand what it is to have limited space and therefore stack hats rather than keep them in boxes. I use the cardboard rings (like what is inside hat boxes but only about 2" deep) to keep some separation between the hats so the top ones don't settle down on the one below. I got these rings from a local hat shop that sells cheap fedoras but the rings have saved my nice hats.
Yes, there's a right way to stack hats. Even with those rings, you still might get what we sometimes call "compression marks" on the brims of the lower hats, cause by the edges of the cardboard rings digging into the felt, helped along by the weight of the hats above. This is likelier to happen when using rings with narrow edges, which are of course more prone to marking the felt than rounded, wider edges would. And then there's the chance that the cardboard rings are made of paper with acid content, which can do some nasty things to the hats.
Those thin transparent plastic liners you sometimes see in the boxes new hats come in might be just the ticket, though. They seem an effective and inexpensive way to keep the felt from making direct contact with the cardboard.
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