Three milliners developed her hat style: first Aage Thaarup, the Danish-born designer who was one of the Queen Mother’s favourites; then the French-born Simone Mirman; and finally Frederick Fox, originally from New South Wales, who has done the most to invent a clean classic silhouette, like the black hat that comes out every year for the Cenotaph.
In contrast to the general restraint, the Queen is surprisingly exotic and adventurous with evening clothes. In fact, Ian Thomas (a horse lover who made fittings a pleasure rather than a penance) invented a new evening style for the Queen when she was already in her 50s. He created the soft, flattering shapes and floating panels in chiffon first seen on the American tour in 1976.
The grand gowns are much more rigid – and they need to be when they have to support brooches pinned to the Garter riband or the Royal Family Orders. (That bodice area is re-inforced with grosgrain ribbon at the back.)
Hartnell was the author of the greatest of the dresses for wedding and coronation. The couturier’s first triumph was the 1947 wedding dress in Duchess satin with pearl-embroidered garlands of jasmine, wheat ears and the white rose of York. But Hartnell panicked when the press accused the Scottish textile mill which had woven the dress fabric of using foreign silk worms. The gown’s decoration was influenced by a study of Botticelli paintings, just as George VI had inspired the designer to look at the paintings of Franz Xavier Winterhalter to create a royal wardrobe for the future Queen Mother in 1938.
Coronation
The Coronation gown was even more dazzling. After presenting the young Queen with eight different concepts, Hartnell explained in his biography Silver and Gold how the historic dress was created, using embroidered flower emblems of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, from the pale pink rose of England, through a lilac Scottish thistle, a pale green Irish shamrock and a Welsh leek that Hartnell had first hoped to replace with a more graceful daffodil. Other embroideries included an Indian lotus flower, wheat ears for Pakistan and a New Zealand fern.
