‘The occasion demanded a poet, and Mr Hartnell has not failed to string his lyre with art,’ wrote historian James Laver, referring to the dress shimmering with light and heavy with symbolism. Hartnell used other themes over the ensuing years, especially for foreign tours in the 1970s: maple leaves for Canada, wattle flowers for Australia and pink cherry blossom for Japan in 1975 on a kimono-sleeved dress. Occasionally these tributes to a host country seemed forced, as when an embroidery of Californian poppies bemused Los Angeles film stars.
Were her advisers always wise in steering the Queen so totally away from fashion? A combination of Hartnell’s love of theatre, the Queen Mother’s view of clothes as ‘props’ and Cecil Beaton’s magical photographic images, produced a look that lasted from 1937 until today.
When Princess Elizabeth came to the throne, the post-war era was greeted as a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, but that fresh young image soon turned mumsy, dowdy and stuck in the 1950s. Part of the problem was that George VI’s premature death brought the Queen to the throne at 25, when she had had no time to develop a personal style and was so very young to have to dress with regal formality.
One former vendeuse for Hartnell even says that she believes that the Queen’s aversion to wearing black dates from the terrible ordeal of flying back from Kenya and attending her father’s funeral.
The Italian designer Valentino once asked the Queen on a visit to Italy why she wore so little black – when it set off her complexion and her jewels so well. He referred to a memory of her beauty at the Vatican in 1961 in a black lace dress. He received a sweet, warm smile – but no answer. Yet the first formal portrait of the Queen after her accession was a striking black crinkled taffeta Hartnell gown, and another successful early ensembles was the ‘Magpie’ dress of 1953 – a bold white panel on a slim black dress.
Private
Friends of the royal family say that in private the Queen wears more casual evening clothes, including black: for example a black velvet top and silver skirt. Her personal daytime wardrobe, mostly countrified, includes Daks skirts, which were fitted by Simpson’s of Piccadilly until the store closed. There are cashmere sweaters, bought in Scotland, Aran-knit cardigans and Burberry raincoats and Barbour jackets for sheepdog trials at Sandringham and Balmoral walks. ‘Princess Elizabeth was happiest, one felt, in country tweeds – and always would be,’ Hartnell said in 1952.
The Queen also has a summer wardrobe of girlish cotton dresses – a sleeveless version of her more familiar long-sleeved shirtwaisters, which go back to the days of the two Princesses at Royal Lodge, Windsor. A rare sighting of her bare arms was on the Royal Yacht in her silver wedding year.
Queen Victoria dismissed dress as a ‘trifling matter’ and discouraged her children from taking an active interest in fashion. Yet clothes always have a psychological dimension and their choice expresses hidden meanings. When the Duke of Windsor wrote A Family Album, a memoir in which clothes were much featured, he said that he had ‘a buttoned up childhood in every sense’. And it is easy to see in his urge to tear off his stiff jackets and starched collars his inability, as Edward VIII, to accept the path of discipline and duty.
