From Kate Middleton's XXL Necklace to Princess Anne's Mary Poppins Style
Meeting of royals at the funeral for Philip of Edinburgh
Indian princes in splendid ceremonial robes escorted
Queen Victoria
to Westminster Abbey on her Golden Jubilee. Her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II is the first to celebrate Platinum: 70 years on the throne.
Although the anniversary is on February 6, the celebrations are the first week of June.
That February 6, 1952, at 7:30 in Sandringham, James MacDonald, George VI's valet, brought the king his morning cup of tea.
He found him dead.
A heart attack during the night.
The news was passed on to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who was still in bed in Downing Street.
He burst into tears.
Isabel was in Kenya with her husband.
Climbing up a tree, she was looking at a rhinoceros in a watering hole.
When the Duke of Edinburgh broke the news to her, Elizabeth was wearing jeans.
She would never be seen in jeans again.
From the coronation to the present
Nine days later, at St George's Chapel in Windsor, three queens attended the funeral: young Elizabeth, her mother, and her elderly grandmother, the Dowager Queen Mary.
Those three queens in mourning - veiled "like Muslim women," wrote Mark Twain -
expressed not only mourning but status with their style.
Seventy years later, a retrospective essay could be written on the type of queen Elizabeth II has been because of her wardrobe.
You don't need to have read 'The Fashion System' by Roland Barthes to know that clothes, accessories or makeup are significant, they communicate something, they send messages.
Elizabeth II, who was
a glamorous young woman as iconic as Marilyn Monroe,
and only six weeks her senior, was the symbol of a supposed new era in a Britain emerging from the privations of World War II.
To understand why or how Elizabeth II has succeeded, it helps to know what the British monarchy is and is not.
The Crown as a narcotic
It is not a tourist attraction, nor is Saint Peter in Rome;
that is the least.
It is not a soap opera, although sometimes it seems that way, for example, when Diana and Camilla fought over Carlos.
It's not a game either, with pretty princesses and toy soldiers.
It is much deeper than that.
The monarchy is a narcotic: Elizabeth II is not known or understood,
she is injected into the veins of the British.
Politicians are accepted for what they say;
to the queen, because she knows the power of saying nothing.
To
express himself through her gestures.
He has never given an interview or collaborated with his biographers.
Of Elizabeth II we do not know what she knows.
Except that she knows what she has to avoid.
Her mother had a horror of female intellectuals and her nanny, Marion Crawford, had to conspire with her grandmother, Queen Mary, to give Lilibet
an education worthy of the name.
The insiders who have seen her bookshelves in Windsor are not talking about geostrategy treatises or first editions of Shakespeare or Schopenhauer, but about tea table books: books about the Labrador retriever, the sloth bear, castles, gnomes. or thoroughbreds.
When Lilibet was 10 years old, the BBC was the world's first broadcaster with a regular service.
In May 1937 she brought cameras to George VI's coronation.
In short, the future queen got used to
living in the public eye,
growing up under the inquisitive lens of the media broadcasting her image around the world for global scrutiny.
The poet Gil de Biedma was born "in the age of the pergola and tennis".
We forgive you.
Elizabeth II has had to reign in the age of photography, film and television.
That is why she has developed a sartorial instinct that is intrinsic to her charge.
It is
the power dressing on the razor's edge.
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Elizabeth came to the throne at the height of British Haute Couture, adopting as her own the designers her mother trusted:
Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies,
who made her the right outfit for the right degree of glamor expected of her. she.
Through his wardrobe, he conveyed the hope of better times, of a happy ending to the miseries of the post-war period.
She then preferred fairy-tale dresses, lavishly embroidered satin.
The young Isabel amplified the exuberance of the New Look, a reference to the silhouette launched by Christian Dior in 1947:
full skirts, tight bodies and wasp waists.
The flower-woman with delicate shoulders, a narrow waist and skirts like corollas.
After the hardship of the war, she returned the glamor to the closets.
Having passed the age in which style was not yet reinforced by conviction, the queen entered a maturity in which virtue was consolidated by custom.
Her wardrobe has been her force de frappe, her
arsenal to bestow power and dignity on the Crown.
She has been dressing for the world stage for seventy years, reconciling her personal taste with the categorical imperative to display it as a work uniform strategically designed not for her own good, but for the country's.
What your clothes mean
These sets of matching suits and coats convey subtle or overt messages: on tour, she wears pins bearing the emblems of the host nation or commissions a dress with allusive motifs.
This
subtle diplomacy
has its roots in her coronation gown, designed by Sir Norman Hartnell, a court couturier, with numerous motifs from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations.
The queen wears
bold shades
because she needs to stand out from the crowd.
Even her choice of hats is strategic, to ensure that her face is fully visible yet perfectly framed.
Since 2014 she creates them Rachel Trevor Morgan.
The fashion designer Stewart Parvin, the shoemakers Anello & Davide and the Launer brand of handbags have developed a subliminal but eloquent language for her.
Elizabeth II at a party in Buckingham Gardens in 2010.Getty
His style expresses opportunity and restraint.
They are expensive handmade garments, but they are neither fashionable nor foreign;
they are striking (you have to see them from afar);
simple (myths have no body);
almost needy (the queen that could be you).
In fact, watching her wash dishes in the long summers at Balmoral makes you dizzy that it could be you.
No woman uses her wealth with such restraint.
It does not go to fashion, but it creates style
The queen does not want to set a trend.
That leaves other people with less important work.
Her clothes have to be distinguished, not sensational.
To win an audience you have to invent a figure.
No need to innovate, just choose a model that works.
The queen
has inspired high-profile female political figures
who needed a style that offered poise.
Like Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan believed that style was a powerful weapon in the White House and became so closely associated with red suits that the particular shade was dubbed Reagan Red.
Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton
all imitated the colour-blocked feminine tailoring used to great effect by the queen.
They themselves became blocks that stand out and endure.
The new generation of queens
We now see the Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Letizia, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, Mary of Denmark or Mette-Marit of Norway in ready-to-wear outfits, both when off duty and for certain engagements.
But
they stick to court dress codes
when it really matters, donning high-octane designs for formal receptions.
You have to be careful to send the right message.
The dress means and means them.
Speak for them and of them.
Baudrillard wrote that the look is to say «I exist, here I am, I am an image.
It is perhaps simulacrum, but not narcissism, it is an exhibition where each one becomes the employer of his own appearance ».
Like that of the Indian princes who escorted Queen Victoria to Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth II's clothing is
a system of signs
that expresses better than words that, although they have wings, do not fly where we would like.
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Elizabeth II of England