The founder of The Man In The Hat shop talks to Tatler about the the hat worn by Cillian Murphy in the film, and the fedora styles worn by Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart and the real J. Robert Oppenheimer
After the July release of Christopher Nolan’s movie on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb”, Hong Kong hatter Richard Avery thought he would see a surge of customers coming to his vintage hat shop looking for the “Oppenheimer hat”—and he was partially right.
People didn’t come wanting to buy the specific style worn by Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor who played Oppenheimer in the film—a flat top fedora with a wide brim—but there were plenty of people wanting to get a hat; any hat.
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Meanwhile, Avery himself has been rocking a fedora way before the film was made, and has long been fascinated with its evolution through popular culture. Recently, Tatler caught up with Avery at his shop, The Man In The Hat in Sai Ying Pun, to talk all things millinery.
“When I look at pictures of [the real] J. Robert Oppenheimer, he’s wearing a hat that looks like he’s reshaped himself,” Avery says, which makes sense to him.
“Oppenheimer’s family had a property in New Mexico, so he spent parts of his childhood there, and he loved to ride horses and enjoyed a kind of western cowboy lifestyle. So I think it’s highly probable that one of the first hats he ever bought was a cowboy hat from Stetson, [a famous US hat brand that’s still popular today]”, he says. Made of animal felt, these hats were designed to be worn in all weathers and could be moulded and reshaped if they were wrecked.
However, he points out that the film got two things wrong, likely for cinematic effect: “One, that Oppenheimer only wore one hat his whole life; and two, he was the only person who wore a hat. That’s simply inaccurate.”