It’s mid-June in Vienna and arriving at my hotel room overlooking the breathtaking Schonbrunn Palace is something just as stately: a young princess. Dressed in a red cord jacket, suede cowboy boots and watermelon-print socks, however, she’s a far cry from former residents of this esteemed address like Empress Maria Theresa, whose lavish Baroque and Rococo gowns influenced a generation of royal courts, or Empress Elisabeth ‘Sissi’ of Austria, whose penchant for pearl and silver star-shaped jewels atop her cheveaux cemented her a style icon in her own right. ‘In Germany, it is just a name and it actually doesn’t mean anything anymore. For me, it doesn’t mean anything because I don’t see myself as something different to others,’ says Princess Eugenia of Hanover, daughter of Prince Heinrich of Hanover (brother of Prince Ernst, the current head of the House of Hanover) and Princess Thyra von Westernhagern.
Indeed, she’s humbly grounded, infectiously giggly and the sort of person you’d die to have at your dinner table. She flips from poised to loose, throwing out witty one-liners as she tells stories of her studies and her burgeoning modelling career. A perfectly balanced yin-yang of a royal and a rebel, she’s an arresting figure with beguiling blue eyes, a young Lauren Hutton pout and bouncing brunette waves. Hanover’s been quietly studying medicine here in the city since moving from her hometown of Göttingen in Germany, but it wasn’t until Paris Couture Week earlier this year that she first caught my attention. Dressed in a floor-length floral gown and black cape, she made her debut at the glitzy event at the Giambattista Valli show in January. ‘I thought it was amazing, all of those voluminous dresses,’ Hanover recalls. The next month she was at the Richard Quinn here in London. ‘It was magical; a show in the snow,’ she confirms.
She is the latest in a line of ever-elegant Hanoverian women who regularly dominate the front row. Her cousin, Princess Alexandra of Hanover and Alexandra’s half-sister Charlotte Casiraghi are firm fixtures at Chanel, but for Eugenia of Hanover, she’s taking a more balanced approach to the behemoth of the fashion industry. In short, she’s almost too cool for school.
But school she does. Very well, in fact. Currently, she’s at a prestigious institution in Vienna studying medicine. ‘My grandfather is an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) professor. I don’t know if he was the reason [I chose this profession], but I always knew I wanted to be independent. Medicine was always on my mind as I got older.’