Queen Elizabeth II and the Lost Art of Fashion Diplomacy
In early 1961, nine years after ascending to the throne of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II made her first visit as monarch to India and Pakistan, among other destinations. The trip had momentous political significance. Both populous nations had formerly been under British colonial rule and were now independent; the British government, led by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, had an interest in maintaining good relations. In India, the Queen showed her appreciation for the country by touring the Taj Mahal and riding an elephant. In Pakistan, she was greeted by President Mohammad Ayub Khan, laid a wreath at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the nation’s founder, and attended a state dinner in Islamabad, the nation’s capital. For that event, the Queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, had fashioned a duchesse-satin evening gown which, seen from the front, was unadorned and almost entirely white but for its wide-set, kingfisher-green shoulder straps. Seen from behind, the gown descended into a waterfall drapery with overlapping layers of white and green satin—a tribute to the colors of the Pakistani flag. The design was an unspoken but unmistakable gesture of recognition and esteem: diplomacy in dress form.
There is only so much diplomacy a dress can be asked to do, of course: Queen Elizabeth II did not go to Islamabad with the goal, for example, of concluding a war that her government had ill-advisedly launched against a foe who was inconveniently failing to crumble. (Vice-President J. D. Vance, for his arrival in Islamabad on just such a mission this past weekend, wore the colors of his own flag: a blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, the unofficial uniform of the MAGA movement.) But the royal gown that the Queen wore in Pakistan is a vivid example of the kind of soft power that can be exerted by a head of state who is otherwise without executive or legislative potency, especially one who takes a keen interest in international affairs, as Elizabeth II clearly did. The year before her royal tour of South Asia, Charles de Gaulle, the French President, made his own state visit to London, and was impressed by the young Queen’s mind, coming to believe, as he wrote in his memoirs, “that she was well-informed about everything, that her judgments, on people and events, were as clear cut as they were thoughtful, that no one was more preoccupied by the cares and problems of our storm-tossed age.” Even Donald Trump, a democratically elected head of state who continually proves himself erratic and unaccountable on the diplomatic front, seems to be dazzled into docility by his encounters with the British Crown, in the person both of Queen Elizabeth II and of her heir, King Charles III, who will be making his own state visit to the U.S. later this month. The President’s attacks this week on the Pope notwithstanding, it seems safe to say that Charles is the international figure least at risk of being subject to a public berating or humiliation by the President, and is perhaps the one most likely to bring out the limited best in his volatile American counterpart. (No Kings, sure. But on the other hand, maybe Kings?)
Charles’s opportunities for sartorial diplomacy on his forthcoming American visit will be limited by his gender: white tie offers little opportunity for message-bearing customization. His mother, however, had command of a wide-ranging language of clothes. Roughly two hundred items from her wardrobe, many never before publicly displayed, are now on view in “The Queen’s Style,” a blockbuster exhibition that has just opened at the King’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace, in London. Her childhood is represented by a handful of garments, including the royal christening gown, first worn in 1841 for the christening of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter. (It continued to be used for every royal baby until 2004.) Other important ceremonial garments are also on display, including the Queen’s wedding dress, from 1947, another Hartnell creation that incorporated not just the white rose of the House of York but also featured orange blossoms, a symbol of fertility. Her coronation gown, from 1953, once again designed by the indefatigable Hartnell, bore embroidered emblems of the four nations of the United Kingdom—the English rose, the Scottish thistle, the Welsh leek, and the shamrock of Northern Ireland—as well as of representative plants from various Commonwealth nations, including a lotus flower for India and a jute plant for Pakistan.
Along with these highly codified garments, there are dozens of formal gowns, including many of the full-skirted, narrow-waisted, arm-and-shoulder-exposing style Elizabeth favored in her first decades on the throne. Her longtime attendant, Margaret McKay (Bobo) MacDonald, reported that Elizabeth, accustomed to the demands of formal wear, could accurately settle a tiara on her head while descending a staircase, without needing to look in a mirror. Also included are the elegant columnar gowns of her middle years and the sturdy sheaths of her long-lasting old age, among them the pale-blue, white-trimmed dress, coat, and hat that she wore during the weekend of celebrations for her Platinum Jubilee, in June, 2022, which ended up being her last major public appearance. (She died three months later, aged ninety-six.)
For more quotidian looks, the Queen often utilized the visual power of color. From early on, she established a signature style, favoring a striking monotone over patterns or color combinations. In a gallery dedicated to daywear for official engagements, monochrome-hued dresses and coats are arrayed in a long, black-lined case—doubled rows of garments in pink and lavender and peach and a delicate citrine, as enticing as a box of Ladurée macarons. The Queen was not above judging the sartorial efforts, or failures, of others: as one longtime aide told Ben Pimlott, her biographer, “She’ll remember exactly what a lady councillor or mayoress was wearing: ‘a ghastly green dress, and the strap fell off.’ ” Queen Elizabeth relied on a small coterie of designers, including Hardy Amies and Ian Thomas; for the last quarter century of her life, she worked with a personal dresser, Angela Kelly, who stewarded an in-house design team. As a result, her outfits never sent shoppers running to the high street in emulation, as the future Queen Catherine’s off-the-peg choices often do. Numerous designers, including Alessandro Michele and the late Vivienne Westwood, have credited the Queen as an inspiration, not least for the kind of sturdy, tweedy daywear shown in a section devoted to her off-duty garments. (A Burberry rain cape on display, made for horse-riding and abbreviated at elbow level, looks like something Jonathan Anderson might send down the runway.) But Pimlott also remarks that Elizabeth was not especially interested in clothes for their own sake. “Her concerns were practical,” he writes. “She wanted to wear dresses that were comfortable and not too expensive, and which would not cause offence.”
As was the case with the white-and-green dress for her Pakistan tour, Elizabeth, in her fashion choices, sought not only to avoid giving offense but to offer symbolic ingratiation, and among the most fascinating garments on display are those representing diplomatic dressing. During a state visit to Japan in 1975—the first time a reigning British King or Queen had ever visited that other tea-drinking island monarchy—she wore a dress of seafoam-blue silk chiffon, whose skirt and long trumpet sleeves were embellished with appliquéd cherry blossoms. Eleven years later, she repeated the gesture for a state visit to China, wearing a glittering pink gown sewn with peonies, widely considered the national flower. For a 1967 visit to Canada, the Queen wore a stunning sculptural gown, its white satin bodice cinching to a waist embroidered with maple leaves and then descending to a flowing skirt of royal blue, thus honoring Canada’s national identity while signalling her ongoing role as that nation’s head of state. A red-and-white dress would have said something else entirely.
The exhibition shows how, on rare occasions, the royal wardrobe was used to express something beyond respect for another nation. In one important instance, one can detect something closer to regret, or remorse, for the way in which Britain subjugated other countries and peoples during the long period of its imperial domination. In 2011, Queen Elizabeth made a historic visit to Ireland, the first by a reigning British monarch since that country’s hard-won independence. Her appearance at a state banquet in Dublin was notable for her opening greeting, which was delivered in Irish—there were gasps in the room—and her acknowledgment of the “sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence, and loss.” She went on to express her faith in continuing reconciliation. For a British monarch, this amounted to a full-throated declaration of culpability, a message that was underlined by the white evening dress she wore for the occasion: the bodice and sleeves were covered in two thousand silk shamrocks. Saying the loud part quietly—that was the work done by this historic gown. She never could have worn it were it not for the careful efforts of diplomats thirteen years earlier, who, for almost two years, painstakingly stitched together the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to what had seemed for three bloody decades to be an intractable conflict between loyalists and republicans in Northern Ireland. As Elizabeth II knew, it takes time and patience, skill and good will, to thread that needle. ♦
