A silver fox is an older man with grey or greying hair who is considered attractive, and usually well-groomed and charming with it. The label is admiring rather than mocking: it is one of the kinder things you can call a man who is getting long in the tooth. Richard Gere, George Clooney and Anderson Cooper are the sort of men the term gets applied to, generally by people other than themselves.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘silver fox’?
The original silver fox has four legs. It is a dark colour form of the common red fox, with a black coat frosted by silver-tipped guard hairs, and the name has been attached to the animal since the eighteenth century. Its pelt was extraordinarily prized. Native peoples of New England are recorded as valuing a silver fox skin at more than forty beaver pelts, and the fur was mostly bought up by Russian and Chinese traders. Wild pelts became so scarce that farming took over: Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton began breeding silver foxes in captivity on Prince Edward Island in 1894, and their farmed pelts fetched hundreds of dollars each at a time when an ordinary fox skin brought twenty or thirty.
So ‘silver fox’ entered the language as a byword for something rare, handsome and expensive, which made it a natural nickname for a distinguished grey-haired man. Foxes had stood for cunning for centuries, and in American slang ‘foxy’ meant attractive as early as 1895, with ‘fox’ for an attractive person following by the 1940s. The nickname for humans, though, predates the pin-up sense. In the 1920s the Brooklyn pitcher Jesse Petty was known as ‘the Silver Fox’, reportedly for his prematurely white hair, and in that era the tag suggested grey hair and craftiness more than sex appeal.
The country singer Charlie Rich carried the nickname through the 1970s; his 1995 New York Times obituary recorded that he was ‘called the Silver Fox because of his prematurely gray hair’. The current sense, in which the silver refers to the hair and the fox to the attractiveness, seems to have settled in around the 1980s and was being defined in Urban Dictionary by 2006 as ‘an attractive older man’. Entertainment outlets now publish annual lists of top silver foxes, a ritual not universally welcomed by the honourees. The actor John Slattery, greyer than most of Mad Men’s cast, said flatly in 2009: ‘I hate Silver Fox. I absolutely hate it.’