‘Clothes are not to be displayed, they are to be worn,’ claimed the late Hardy Amies, one of the triumvirate of designers who shaped her style, along with Hartnell and Ian Thomas, both also now deceased, as is Ken Fleetwood, Amies’ partner. The Queen later gave the Royal Warrant to dressmaker Maureen Rose, whom she knew from Ian Thomas; and to Karl Ludwig Rehse, who worked with the late John Anderson.
Hartnell was the author of grand and romantic evening gowns, but Amies’ trim and streamlined tailoring was probably nearer to the Queen’s personal taste. Whereas the Queen Mother turned her back on tailoring in favour of lightweight floaty fabrics, the Queen likes structure. The photographs of her in uniform in the war defined the new trim shape of a young woman who had only just shed her puppy fat.
Outfits
Typically, a tailored outfit will be an unfussy jacket, with a lapel on which to pin a brooch, in a solid colour for the city, checked only in the country. There are also coats, fitted and buttoned, or straight and collarless, worn with matching or toning ‘investiture’ dresses, as courtiers describe them.
Skirts are always cut with a full flare, or pleated to cover the knees when sitting on a rostrum. The gaffes of her inexperienced daughters-in-law – the see-through skirt of Lady Diana Spencer or Sarah, Duchess of York’s dress blowing up in the wind – proved by contrast how meticulous and carefully thought out the Queen’s wardrobe is. Hemlines of summer dresses are all weighted down; dresses are lined with organza to prevent static cling; and her dressers demand ‘disciplined’ fabrics, meaning something that would not crumple like Diana’s taffeta wedding dress.
The Queen herself will tell her milliners that she can’t have a deep-crown hat because on overseas tours she travels in a low-roofed limousine, rather than her roomy Rolls Royce. ‘Crawfie’ recalled the ‘effort it had been to persuade the Princess to change into a new hat’. Yet the Queen is aware of the symbolism of wearing the last vestige of the crown (even if in private she prefers a head-scarf).
