Anthony Eden Hat - Eden's Style

Eden's Style

Eden became, at 38, the youngest Foreign Secretary since Pitt the Younger in the late 18th century. As a relatively youthful politician among mostly much older men, he appeared fashionably dressed, even flamboyant. In 1936 the American magazine Time referred to his "pin-stripe trousers, modish short jacket and swank black felt hat", worn during a diplomatic mission to the League of Nations in Geneva. Many remarked too on Eden's "film star" appeal, even as late as the 1950s when, as Prime Minister, he retained his youthful good looks. His biographer D. R. Thorpe, who likened the young Eden to a mixture of Sir Galahad (Eden won the Military Cross in the First World War) and Beau Brummel (the Regency dandy in whose London house Eden lived for a time), commented on a photograph of him, arriving in Russia by train in hat and fur-lined coat in 1935, that "it seemed to some as if Tolstoy's Count Vronsky were alighting at the platform".

In addition to the Homburg, Eden was associated with the mid-1930s fashion for wearing a white linen waistcoat with a lounge suit, while the poet and novelist Robert Graves likened Eden's moustache to those of film stars Ronald Colman, William Powell and Clark Gable: "the new moustache was small, short and carefully cut, sometimes slightly curved over the lip at either end, sometimes making a thin straight line". When Eden visited New York in 1938 he was "deluged with fan mail from teenage college girls to elderly matrons", while women reporters and society editors "gushed about his classic features, his long dark eyelashes, his limpid eyes, his clear skin, his wavy hair, his charm and magnetism". In another American city, a display of Homburgs in a shop window was adorned with the sign "Welcome to Anthony Eden". In Amsterdam the hat became known as the "Lord Eden".