“I didn’t even know how to get dressed in the morning,” Harry wrote in Spare of the code-breaking required to dress for class at Eton. As one Eton graduate told The Cut, “William was very integrated…. William was a Pop, so he was like a homecoming-king type. I think Harry probably had it harder finding his way.”
But Harry did indeed find his own path at Eton. “If it wasn’t for the sports field, and the amount of sports that were on offer, there’s no way I would have stayed in school,” he told Time in June.
Ironically, sports uniforms at Eton are even harder to comprehend than the regular daily uniform. There’s a whole book dedicated to the 90-odd different colors and combinations, called “sports colours” and worn by Eton’s sports teams and Houses. Eton Colours: An Essential Illustrated Aide Memoire by Old Etonian Lachlan Campbell is a 64-page guidebook “for any current Eton boy, Beak, parent, or Old Etonian…interested in the history and traditions of British sport and style,” proclaims a blurb that might itself need a guidebook. For what it’s worth, a “Beak” is a teacher.
According to lore, the Eton uniform originated when boys dressed in black to mourn the death of King George III in 1820. But that’s “absolute rubbish,” says Stephenson. “I don’t know where that’s come from.”
Instead, she argues, uniforms came about gradually in the 19th century, when schools like Eton and Harrow (a posh boy’s school snubbed by British royalty but attended by Winston Churchill) needed to rein in the rowdy sons of the upper classes.
In the 18th century, Eton, Harrow, and the like “were known for being a bit wild,” Stephenson says. “They were the places where elites were educated, but they were not well supervised. There was a huge effort in the 19th century to clean them up. And the uniform becomes part of that movement.”
