The Queen is just there, isn’t she? Like the sofa. She’s Blur on the radio. She’s an accompaniment, like relish. She’s a constant, like your mum or your grandma. But you never go, “Oh, not that bloody woman again,” like you do about Anne Robinson. Everybody loves the Queen.
I’ve seen her a million times, this All-Time Queen of Colour Blocking, but when it came to dressing like her, I felt I needed some inspiration. I wanted to get it right. So I went up west to do some window shopping.
I bought some bunting. And a fake tiara. I even pondered an orange Launer handbag – the Queen’s bag, though hers is black – until I saw the £1,020 price tag.
The woman in whose likeness I am fashioned here, looking only marginally more convincing than the cardboard version, is an icon in the true sense of the word.
She is instantly recognisable, always visible, a woman who endures more outfit changes in a year than most of us do in a decade. On her first Commonwealth tour in 1953, the Queen was accompanied by more than 100 specially commissioned outfits. There have been more than 170 Commonwealth visits since then, not to mention all the state ones.
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Throughout this journey, this constant scrutiny, if there have been any wardrobe malfunctions, we have never seen or heard of them. This is some feat.
In researching the Queen’s different looks over the past 60-odd years, it tickled me to discover that she was giving her dresses names long before the high street cottoned on to the act. “It’s the only way we know which is which,” says Stewart Parvin, her current designer.
Her dressers also catalogue where every outfit has been worn, “so if she were going to meet President Obama, she wouldn’t wear the same dress. That’s why people think she wears things once, because there’s such a system.” Of course, this information is all done on computer and communicated via e-mail – a luxury that the Queen’s former designers, Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell, could only have dreamed about.
Another striking thing is how little the Queen’s style has changed. Throughout rationing, Beatlemania, the miners’ strike and several wars, she is the still drop of knee-length lemon in an ocean of flux. The world changed, but Elizabeth stayed the same. Partly, one feels, this sartorial steadiness was born out of duty and necessity: bright colours have always been a part of her wardrobe because she needs to be visible; modest skirt lengths are fittingly regal; low-heeled shoes have been a constant because comfort is key when she is on her feet all day. When Parvin recently revealed that she has someone break in her shoes – a delicious detail – few could disagree with his view that “she has the right to have someone to wear them in”. No doubt Victoria Beckham and Angelina Jolie are advertising for a “shoe breaker-inner” as we speak.
But duty and necessity are not the only reasons the Queen’s style has remained steadfast. It is unaltered because it functions perfectly, so why change it? The Queen strikes me as a woman who “found herself” early on in life and had no desire to keep searching for self-expression in an ill-judged velvet gown with a piecrust collar, like Sarah Ferguson.
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In her book The Little Princesses, Marion Crawford, governess to Elizabeth and Margaret, insisted that “Lilibet never cared a fig. She wore what she was told without argument.” Yet surely this says more about her sense of duty than her feelings about clothes. The Queen might not be interested in fashion, but she is interested in the language of her own clothes. There is comfort to be had from a monarch who doesn’t change her style according to fashionable diktats, or join her subjects in some payday splurge in Peter Jones.
It was not my idea to dress as the Queen. It was my editor’s and she wanted corgis.There were four corgis on this shoot: very well trained, very obedient, very allergic to hairspray, apparently.
“Not in front of the dogs,” said their owner, as the hairdresser spritzed me in a cloud of Elnett. “The dogs are important, too.”
“The dogs are more important,” I assured her.
“This man is scaring them,” she told me, as though the hairdresser couldn’t hear. “My dogs aren’t used to men like him.”
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“The hair has to be perfect,” said the hairdresser. “It has to be big.”
This is a first, I thought. I am mediating between four corgis and a hairdresser while dressed as Queen Elizabeth.
Finding the clothes was easier. There are loads of majesterial clothes in the shops. Headscarf and riding boots? Hermès. Prim dress in printed silk? Erdem came up trumps. Bracelet-sleeved coat in the Queen’s favourite shade of yellow? Thank you, Louis Vuitton. The regal triumvirate of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and Princess Anne are frequently referenced by designers, and never more so, it seems, than in the collections for spring 2012, the season that coincides with the Jubilee. Since fashion currently has a love affair with the Fifties and Sixties, the decades in which the Queen’s “Lady” style is anchored, perhaps this should come as no surprise.
But then, what use does Modern Woman have for “the Lady”? The Queen might be required to look highly visible in pale lemon, but for most women, pale lemon is nothing more than a high-maintenance dry-cleaning nightmare. And yet anecdotal evidence from John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Topshop suggests that we’re all queueing up to wear knee-length skirts, pretty blouses and pastel colours. Do I believe this hype? Hmm…
Even if “Queenstyle” is popular among young women this season, it has little appeal to HRH’s contemporaries. Dressing up as the Queen made me think of how much Britain has changed. Women in their seventies and eighties are far less willing to wear their hair grey, or have it set, or wear anything knee-length: too frumpy. I can’t be the only person who knows a host of septuagenarians who dye their hair, use GHD straighteners, have a fondness for linen and are still engaged in the quest to find the perfect ankle boot. Fashion is ageless now, as it should be.
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I recall the royal wedding, and all the other women – Mrs Beckham, Mrs Cameron, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the tacky blonde South African cousins – looking strained with the effort of looking perfect. Then the Queen arrived, effortless in buttercup. It doesn’t matter whether her style is right for now: it is right for her, as it has always been.