The Tilted Hat and the Eugénie Craze

The 1920s were the decade of the cloche - a close-fitting, bell-shaped hat pulled right down over the head so you could barely see the wearer's eyes. The 1930s swept that away almost immediately. Hats shrank, perched, and tilted, worn at a steep angle over one eye or one ear, showing off the carefully waved hair underneath. It's one of the quickest ways to tell a 1930s photograph from a 1920s one.

The moment that kicked it off was the Eugénie hat. In the film Romance (1930), Greta Garbo wore a small, tilted, feathered hat designed by Adrian, inspired by the styles worn by the Empress Eugénie of France in the 1860s. It was an instant sensation. By 1931, "Eugénie hats" - small, often trimmed with an ostrich plume, and worn tipped sharply to one side - were being made and sold everywhere at every price level. The craze burned out quickly, as crazes do, but the tilted angle stayed for the rest of the decade.

After that, 1930s millinery got more and more playful. Hats came as berets, pillboxes, tiny toques, doll hats, and sculptural shapes decorated with veils, bows, feathers, and flowers. At the most extreme end, Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with Salvador Dalí on a hat shaped like an upside-down shoe, one of the stars of the surrealism and fashion entry. I think the tilted hat is a lovely example of how much Hollywood was shaping everyday fashion by the 1930s: a single costume on a single star could change what women all over the world wore on their heads.