Style queen
Elizabeth II is so this season
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Those of us who grew up between Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 and her Golden in 2002 may experience difficulty regarding her as a fashion force. Her late Majesty seemed a stopped clock style-wise: prim, dowdy, old before her time. After all, she was only 51 in 1977 - more spring chickenish than yours truly today. Given, this was an age at which one’s 40th birthday marked the occasion for a ceremonial bestowing of perm and cardigan. Still, QEII appeared fixed as some sort of poster anachronism.
As a nipper, the only style conviction I possessed was that the Queen didn’t have it. Instead, I perceived – what? - a certain offness, granting my first insight as to what the word “unfashionable” meant. The necessary formality doubtless stymied matters, together with the embrace of new lengths, bold print and psychedelic hues conservatively late. And then there were the more experimental of her headpieces (cascading, snot-green chains, anyone?)
There was also the tendency to dress twinnily like her septuagenarian mother and matronly sister; the latter all the more buttock-clenching for clearly considering herself a looker. I still remember the Not the Nine O’Clock News parody of the queasy, can-it-be-soft-focus, Norman Parkinson 80th birthday portrait of the Queen Mother, her daughters flanking her in kitschily luminous purple. It demanded no altering for the show’s satirists to render it as a naff album cover.
And, yet, as Buckingham Palace’s stupendous new exhibition demonstrates, these years represented an atypical disengagement for a sartorially acute monarch for whom dress provided a means of power not merely soft. Before – and, indeed after – Elizabeth II was as much as a fashion phenomenon as her Tudor namesake. Did the years between the late 70s and the century’s turn mark a menopausal loss of mojo? Was this combined with a desire not to be confused with the modishly power-shouldered Margaret Thatcher, who had already requisitioned HM’s trademark pearls and Launer handbag?
Probably it was a relief to yield the spotlight to the younger women joining The Firm. Yet, The King’s Gallery’s Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style exposes the idea that it was Princess Diana who was the House of Windsor’s great fashion maven as the fabrication it is. As one is constantly having to remind Gen Z, a good many of us derided the then Princess of Wales’s choices for being first crashingly Sloane, then crassly Wham!, ending up as that bit too Brent Cross. Aspirational they weren’t.
In contrast, the story the Palace tells of Elizabeth II is that of a natty young woman who created a British couture industry around her, scoring brilliantly according to contemporary concerns. Her wardrobe championed the nation and its regions, while being admirably sustainable, worn and reworn across decades. Moreover, as she entered old age, the Queen emerged as a global fashion phenomenon, muse to Christopher Kane, Alessandro Michele, Erdem Moralioglu and Miuccia Prada. The stopped clock of my childhood was once again telling the time.
This season, QEII is very much fashion’s ur-referent. Behold, skirt suits at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior; Demna’s bold car coats with headscarves for Gucci; Prada’s long gloves and top-handled bags, and Simone Rochas’s tiaras. Givenchy features trench coats, Chanel pearls with brights, Celine jodhpurs. It’s a resplendently queenly season and I am – as the young would put it – here for it.
For many years, I boasted a series of Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies jackets of a late 80s, early 90s vintage, acquired at Victoria’s Retromania. This second-hand cornucopia is a brisk stroll from Buck House, near my cobbler, who has since moved and acquired a royal warrant, and my dry cleaner, who handled Palace uniforms.
Said garments were sublime: peacock-hued, superbly-shouldered, with fabulous, fitted waists. The sole black number was a mourning style so severe it felt like death itself. They fitted me like couture. And it felt entirely possible that they were, only for an aristocrat of (a shrinking) 5’4 rather than a pleb of (a pretend) 5’8.
Reader, I gave them away. I know, I know! But, living in central London means occupying one’s own storage vault - anything not currently on one’s body has to be passed to another. “Do you think they could have been hers?” I asked a conservator at the exhibition’s opening bash. She regarded me with pity: “I think they might well have been.” I shall solace myself in The King’s Gallery until autumn.
Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style is at The King’s Gallery, London SW1, 10 April to 18 October
And she had to make it up as she went along. Victoria had chickened out with widow’s weeds for the last 40 years of her life, and poor Anne (“Brandy Nan, Brandy Nan, left in the lurch; her face to the gin-shop, her back to the church”) was too long ago to be any helpful guide. It was a shame when HM stopped wearing uniform; but you only have to look at the Annigoni portrait in the Fishmongers’ Hall to see how extraordinarily alive to spectacle she was.