How vintage is a tweed fedora?

[avedwards]

I know that in England certainly a lot of elderly men (70+ usually) wear flat caps and also tweed fedoras. But very rarely a felt hat. Could the use of tweed be because it is easier to get hold of these days and few elderly people use the internet to find hats?

Or were tweed fedoras worn back in the Golden Era? In films the only one I have seen is on Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes where it is a substitute for the deerstalker.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Yes, they were worn back then. I've seen pictures of 'em dating back to the early 1900s. (Rex Harrison's hat in My Fair Lady was in fact period accurate.)


1930s issues of Esquire magazine also showed them. (See image below at right: a tweedy plaid number.) More a sort of bucket hat rather than a fedora.

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[Hal]

I know that in England certainly a lot of elderly men (70+ usually) wear flat caps and also tweed fedoras. But very rarely a felt hat. Could the use of tweed be because it is easier to get hold of these days and few elderly people use the internet to find hats?
Or were tweed fedoras worn back in the Golden Era? In films the only one I have seen is on Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes where it is a substitute for the deerstalker.

There was a minor hat revival in Britain in the middle 1980s (which didn't last); quite a few men in their 30s and 40s took to wearing tweed trilbies (in the British sense of the word - "fedora" has only recently crossed the Atlantic), but the most frequent style had the brim turned down all round (is this known as an "Irish walking hat" in the USA?). The (now sadly defunct) firm of Dunn and co. sold both the true trilby and the walking hat. What you have observed may be a relic of this, though as Marc has said, these hats have a longer history.

 

[Torpedo]

There are other tweed hats featured in well known movies: Peter Sellers wears one as Inspector Clouseau in the various Pink Panther films (probably as a nod to Sherlock's deerstalker), and Sean Connery as Dr. Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Regards!

 

[Daoud]

I think tweed hats have always been popular in the British Isles because tweed is common, it's used-and has been for a LONG time- for everyday clothes, so it's something that is ready at hand and can easily provide the material for a hat. Felt is a much more specialised sort of thing and I can't imagine that there ever were very many hatters in the country and the small villages, and in any case cash to purchase a manufactured hat would have been hard to come by- tweed could be had by means of local trading, if there were no weavers in the household.