A Trilby as a Curate's Egg?

"If you want to get ahead, get a hat" advised an ad slogan from the 1940's. Hat-maker George Dunn wanted people to think the right hat was essential for business success. But hats for general purpose wear fell out of fashion by the 1960's. Some say it was due to longer hair styles. Others blame the limited headroom in cars. That was certainly part of it, and increased transport by car also meant that people didn't need to wear as much protection from the weather. Hats declined steadily throughout the 20th century, with occasional upticks in interest. Harrison Ford single-handedly (single-headedly?) made Fedoras popular again in the 1990s through his Indiana Jones persona, shown in the image above.

Fedoras were introduced during the 1880's by celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt through a play, “Fédora”. Bernhardt played the title role, and sported a center-creased, soft brimmed hat. That style hat was soon a popular fashion item for women. When Queen Victoria's son, Prince Edward of Britain, started wearing fedoras, the hat was adopted by many more men, replacing more formal headgear. Prince Edward himself was feckless, lazy, indiscreet and irresponsible - completely unsuited for national leadership. His mother, Queen Victoria, wrote "I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder." But just as Trump has nice suits, thoughtless, lazy, incompetent Eddie had a great hat.

Prince Edward, later King Edward VII, wearing Sarah Bernhardt's fancy fedora hat.

Today, many people have lost the ability to identify hats and hat styles. For example, how does a fedora differ from a trilby? What is that shapeless pudding bowl on Sean Connery's head in the picture at the top? It's a trilby, but with the brim folded down all the way round, creating a goofy look. Trilbies were much more stylish when worn by Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball, as this picture illustrates.

The picture shows the key features of a trilby:

• soft felt material
• narrow brim, turned down at front
• indented and pitched crown
• hat band around the crown base
• sleek and rakish, like 007.

A trilby is a variety of fedora. The fedora has a wider brim and the fedora brim is never turned down at the front (Indiana Jones stretches this rule a bit). By one of those strange coincidences that occur in the world of millinery, the trilby was also popularized by and named for a character in a play. The trilby hat's name derives from the stage adaptation of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, about a fictional laundress Trilby O'Ferrall. A hat of this style was worn in the first London production of the play, and came to be called "a Trilby hat". What are the chances of that?! Both trilby and fedora are named after a character in a Victorian play who wore a novel felt hat!

Playwright George du Maurier created the Trilby name and character, and was the grandfather of author Daphne du Maurier. But he was better known as the artist of the "Curate's Egg" cartoon, which ran in Punch, in 1895. (A curate is an assistant vicar in training in the Church of England dogma).

Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones";

Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!" 

The curate, desperate not to offend his host and employer, offers the Bishop an implausible assurance that the egg has good qualities which offset the rank sourness. The cartoon introduced the phrase "curate's egg" to Britain. It describes something that is expected to be good, but in fact is spoiled, yet praised anyway.

The final issue of Punch, published in 1992, reprinted the original cartoon with the new caption: "Curate: This f**king egg's off!" Punch drew a contrast with the modern era, implying that young people now value brash directness over false Victorian sensibilities.

We haven't yet mentioned the homburg hat, which is a slightly larger and fancier version of the fedora, developed in Germany's hat town, Bad Homburg (just north of Frankfurt). The homburg was also popularized by Prince Eddie in the 1880's; possibly his only tangible accomplishment. With regal approval, the homburg was picked up by the next generation of politicians. There are plenty of pictures of Winston Churchill in a homburg. Prime Minister Anthony Eden wore one so often, the style was also known as an "Eden hat" - but it was just a plain black homburg.

PM Anthony Eden, lurching between crises in an "Eden hat" (actually, a homburg).

Winston Churchill with his trademark homburg and Romeo y Julieta cigar.

There you have it: three popular hats, two springing from title roles in Victorian plays, and both of those migrating from womenswear to menswear. One of these was brought to life by the same man who pioneered the concept of the curate's egg. No, a trilby isn't a curate's egg; trilbies remain very popular today. Rotten eggs, not so much.

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Peter