The Duke’s influence on men’s fashion throughout the Western hemisphere is undeniable and it is highly likely that there are a number of bucks in your life who loaf about town entirely ignorant that they are wearing the togs that he first introduced.
The attached is a 1950 article from an American fashion trade magazine that lists a number of fashion innovations first sported by the Duke of Windsor, illustrated by seven photos.
Attached is a 1936 article that addressed the issue of self-imposed censorship that the British press corps practiced during much of the Wallis Simpson scandal:
Innuendo about King Edward’s friend Mrs. Wallis Simpson, previously barred from London newspapers, crept in last week and even colored the august columns of the London Times.
This article can be divided into two parts: the first half addresses King Edward VIII and his concern for the impoverished souls of his realm who languished daily in squalor, while the second half was devoted to gossip and innuendo as to who Wallis Simpson was, what was her Baltimore life like and when did she first see the king.
(She first saw him in 1920).
George V’s son is a regular. He has the ‘bonhomie’of a Broadway John, smokes all the time, admires a pretty face with an open affection, is bored by Beethoven, is a disciple of American jazz, and he hates to get up early in the morning.
This torn page from VOGUE will let you in on Edward VIII (1894-1972), Prince of Wales, and his whirl wind tour in the dominion of Canada in 1919. All the swells of the snowy North stepped out in full regalia to meet him.
A five page magazine article which saluted the heir of Britain’s King George V, Edward VIII (1894 – 1972: following his 1936 abdication he was granted the title Duke of Windsor). The article was written by the venerable journalist and U.S. Civil War veteran, George Haven Putnam (1844 – 1930) in order to mark the first visit made to the United States by that crowned head.
In 1935 Edward VIII, while still a prince, wished to launch a national thank-you offering to the younger generation:
‘The Prince’, said The News Chronicle of London, ‘has put his finger on the weakest point in our present social structure. The State shows at least some concern for infancy and childhood, for the blind and defective, for the widow and the aged. The task of helping youth at the most critical age has been abandoned almost entirely to voluntary agencies, and the Prince wisely does not seek to supersede, but to reinforce and extend them.’
Written a year and a half prior to his abdication, it was written to serve as a profile of the royal and it lays out for the reader the man’s personal preferences as well as his training.
Often reluctant to accept conservative advice, the Prince is aggravated when would-be mentors say something he wants to do ‘really shouldn’t be done, you know’. Thus, long before the problem of kingship are his in fact, the Prince has turned serious.
With an odd sense of foreboding, the very young Edward VIII wrote these words at the age of nine:
…And here he was, at the end of twenty months, a king out of a berth…sent away from his kingdom almost without a single protest from those who he had tried to aid.
I find great pleasure in my talks with the woman who first aroused me to a sense of my kingly duties.
She jokingly refers to herself as the instigator of my downfall.
The primary topic of the article pertains to some hot water that the Duke was stewing in at the time for having attended Catholic services; even as the ‘Former Defender of the Faith’, this was seen as very bad form.
With the news that he was now dependent on checks from his family
the newly minted Duke of Windsor had to learn to cut coupons and bargain:
In the Vienna hotel where he gets a private haircut, he protested that $1.26 seemed a little steep for the brief use of an empty hotel room. The manager sliced the fee in half.
