By Oliver Harry - Founder and Creative Director of Ghini Como, a silk scarf brand based in Argegno on Lake Como
Quick facts: silk scarves through the decades
- When Hermès launched its carré in 1937, Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, and Gloria Swanson were already fans of silk scarves, wearing them folded as headbands, belts, bows, or ribbons, and even turned into turbans kept together with a brooch
- The rise of Hollywood cinema in the 1920s and 1930s helped popularise headscarves, with movie stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich often seen wearing them on and off the silver screen, inspiring women worldwide to embrace the accessory
- Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Grace of Monaco, and Jacqueline Kennedy each, independently and effortlessly, reached for the silk scarf because it was the right thing to wear — these were not endorsements but the choices of the most closely examined women of their era
- Queen Elizabeth II wore silk scarves from her youth, and on the postage stamp dedicated to the 60th anniversary of her reign, she is depicted not in a crown but in a Hermès scarf
- The quiet luxury trend of the 2020s has returned the silk scarf to the centre of fashion culture for a new generation, with Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Dua Lipa all photographed in the silk headscarf and neck knot methods that Hepburn and Kelly made canonical
From Hollywood's golden age to the quiet luxury era: every generation that wore Como silk
It is no secret that icons like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy were famous for wearing silk scarves. Tie a silk scarf around your neck and you are bound to have people comparing you to these elegant Jet Set era celebrities.
What you might not know is that the silk in those scarves almost certainly came from Lake Como, in Northern Italy. In fact, almost every wealthy and famous figure over the past two hundred years has worn Como silk at one point or another - from Napoleon to Elvis Presley, and Queen Elizabeth II to Barack Obama.
For a lake that is primarily known for its booming tourism industry, this is an incredible achievement. While Como's silk story stretches all the way back to the Renaissance, we will today focus on how Como silk influenced popular culture during the 20th Century:
The 1920s: flappers, film stars, and silk as liberation
The 1920s were the first decade in which the silk scarf became a mass cultural phenomenon rather than an aristocratic privilege, and the mechanism of that transformation was Hollywood.
The rise of cinema helped popularise headscarves, with movie stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich wearing them on and off the silver screen, inspiring women across Europe and America to follow.
Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, and Gloria Swanson wore silk scarves folded as headbands, tied as belts, fashioned into bows and ribbons for their flapper dresses, and even turned into turbans kept together at the front with a brooch.
These were not styling accidents. These were women who understood that a single piece of good silk could do more than most accessories in a wardrobe.
The cultural significance cannot be overstated.
The 1920s were the decade in which women's public dress became, for the first time, a subject of genuine mass cultural attention. When Garbo wore a silk headscarf off-screen, it was reported and imitated on a global scale. The silk in those photographs came from Italian workshops.
Como had been the dominant Italian silk district for centuries, and the quality that made Italian silk the first choice for Paris's luxury houses in the 1920s was the same quality that had made it the first choice for the courts of Renaissance Europe four centuries earlier.
The 1930s: Wallis Simpson and silk as power dressing
The 1930s introduced a new kind of celebrity to the silk scarf's history: the politically significant woman whose every sartorial choice was subjected to the same scrutiny as a policy decision.
Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, was the most examined woman in Europe in the mid-1930s, at the centre of the constitutional crisis that produced the abdication of Edward VIII.
Her wardrobe in this period, documented obsessively by the press on both sides of the Atlantic, included silk scarves worn with the kind of precise, considered elegance that characterised everything she put on.
Simpson understood that her appearance was always a communication, and she used silk the way a skilled orator uses emphasis: sparingly, precisely, and to maximum effect.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were among the celebrated visitors who came to Lake Como, drawn by the same combination of landscape and luxury that has attracted the powerful to the lake for five centuries. They arrived in a region whose primary industry was producing the silk that she and her contemporaries wore.
Alongside Simpson, the style icons of the 1930s, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, and Marlene Dietrich, defined an aesthetic of soft draping and feminine tailoring in which silk played a central role as the fabric that moved correctly, draped correctly, and communicated the right social register.
The 1940s: silk in wartime and what endured
The Second World War interrupted the luxury silk market without eliminating the silk scarf's cultural presence. Even during the war the scarf did not disappear.
In the American "We Can Do It" poster from 1942, the woman in a work overall wears a red and white polkadot scarf to keep her hair away from machinery. The wartime silk scarf was practical rather than luxurious, but the gesture was the same one Garbo had made in Hollywood a decade earlier.
Queen Elizabeth II began wearing Hermès scarves in the 1940s, most famously during country outings and equestrian events, establishing a habit that would last for the entirety of her public life and produce one of the most sustained celebrity associations in the history of any accessory.
The 1950s and 1960s: the decade that defined the silk scarf forever
Grace Kelly used a silk scarf to support an injured arm in a photograph that went around the world. Audrey Hepburn tied one around her hair in Roman Holiday. Jackie Kennedy wore them on her head, around her neck, and as belts throughout the most closely photographed years of her public life.
What connected all three women, despite their very different contexts and aesthetics, was what the silk scarf communicated. It meant that its wearer had taste rather than fashion. It meant a relationship with quality that was comfortable and unself-conscious rather than performative. It communicated a kind of composed authority that neither jewellery nor clothing could deliver as efficiently as a square of good Italian silk.
On the postage stamp dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, she is depicted not in a crown but in a Hermès scarf. That detail tells you everything about the lofty status the silk scarf had achieved by the end of the twentieth century.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s: silk through the decades of change
The 1970s brought the silk scarf into contact with the countercultural movements that were simultaneously dismantling and reinventing the visual language of luxury.
Rock stars, models, and the new celebrity class all wore silk scarves, but they wore them differently from Kelly and Kennedy, more loosely, more ironically, with a deliberate ease that was itself a statement.
Bianca Jagger wore silk scarves in the 1970s with the same composed authority that Kelly had brought to them in the 1950s, but in the Studio 54 context rather than Monaco.
The scarf crossed that cultural boundary without losing its essential character, which is the specific property that has made it last when other accessories from each decade have not.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the silk scarf remained a constant in the wardrobes of the most closely observed women of the culture.
Princess Diana wore Hermès scarves consistently throughout her public life. The supermodels of the early 1990s, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, were photographed in silk scarves on and off the runway.
The 2020s: quiet luxury and the return of considered dressing
The quiet luxury movement that gained cultural momentum in the early 2020s is, at its core, a preference for quality over novelty, for understated signals over loud ones, for objects with a documented provenance over items whose value is purely in their logo. It is precisely the aesthetic context in which a 14-momme Como silk scarf makes the most sense.
Kendall Jenner, Dua Lipa, and Bella Hadid have all been photographed in the silk headscarf knotted under the chin, with Audrey Hepburn cited as the direct reference point.
The difference is that in 2026, the buyer has more access than ever before to silk produced by the same mills and to the same standard as the scarves worn by Kelly and Kennedy, at a price that reflects the scale of the brand rather than the quality of the silk.
Oliver Harry is the founder of Ghini Como, a luxury silk scarf brand that sources its silk exclusively from Como, Italy. He lives in Argegno on the western shore of Lake Como.
