Queen Elizabeth II was known for her unique appearance, reflecting a personal style she chose for herself to match her position, as she wore brightly colored suits, matching hats and neat gloves.
During the seventy years she ruled the United Kingdom, the Queen adopted all shades of colors in her looks, from bright yellow to filo green, fuchsia and royal blue.
Her grandson Harry considers her look “amazing and perfect”, whatever color she wears.
Fashion designers and fashion consultants who worked for the Queen developed her unique style over time, including Norman Hartnell, who designed her wedding dress using silk as a fabric embroidered with ten thousand pearls and studded with crystals.
The Queen’s appearance stunned the Britons at the time from World War II.
Hartnell also designed the silk dress she wore to her inauguration in 1953.
Hartnell explained that the design was inspired by “the sky, the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, and anything that might be embroidered on a dress would be historic.”
“Designing the Queen’s clothes is no easy task,” said Hardy Eames, the Queen’s official approved designer between 1955 and 1990 and who designed the floral dress she wore during the Silver Jubilee celebration of her accession to the throne in 1977.
For more than two decades, Angela Kelly has made sure that the Queen’s looks are always perfect.
The Englishman, who comes from a humble Liverpool family, joined Queen Elizabeth II’s fashion team in 1993, and became her own coordinator in 2002.
During the quarantine period imposed as a result of the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic, Kelly herself cut the Queen’s hair, according to what she recounts in a book authorized by Buckingham Palace to be published.
Although the Queen was a loyal customer, coordinating her looks was not an easy task, because the royal dress is subject to certain rules and members of the royal family should beware of any wrong move in this regard.
“There are no written rules of dress, but costumes should be governed by etiquette and protocol,” Grant Harold, a former butler to the royal family, told AFP.
He added, “It was impossible, for example, to see the queen wearing black pantyhose or wearing red nail polish, but she was only wearing pantyhose of the same skin color.”
As for nail polish, it should be a very light pink because it is more elegant, he said.
One color look
Harold pointed out that the Queen’s clothing set “never contained any short skirts that did not exceed the knee,” while the Queen adorned her looks with jewelry that consisted of a brooch pin or a pearl necklace, preferably of three layers.
Although the Queen maintained old traditions such as wearing hats that she rarely went out without, some of her habits, such as wearing gloves in summer and winter, had a “practical” aspect, Harold noted.
He said the queen was wearing gloves “to make sure not to pick up any germs or the virus responsible for the common cold” when shaking hands with others.
Her choice of the colors of her clothes was the most prominent characteristic of her style, and she made it easy to distinguish among the crowd, because her height was one meter and 63 centimeters.
“The Queen is known for her brightly-coloured costumes, which are meant to be easily distinguished from the crowd during important occasions,” Caroline de Ghetto, curator of an exhibition dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, noted in a 2016 interview.
During the weekends she spent in one of her country houses, the Queen would abandon the hat and adopt a simple scarf, a Scottish loincloth and a pair of boots, while during her official engagements she adopted a one-color look from head to toe.
And Michel Clapton, the designer of clothes for the series “The Crown”, considered that the Queen’s clothes on these occasions were a “formal attire”.
And she indicated in an interview with “Vogue” magazine in 2016, that “the Queen may be in the garden with her dogs and then appear moments later wearing a suit and a hat and gloves.”
And the Queen’s clothes were sometimes a means of communicating messages. During official visits, for example, she would put a pin in the form of a transport plant adopted in Ireland as a symbol or another that takes the form of a Canadian maple leaf, as a way to honor her hosts.
It was rumored that she always carried the “Loner” bag, of which she owned more than 200 copies, in order to send secret signals to her team.
To work for the Queen, secrecy was necessary, which Rigby & Blair, a manufacturer of high-end bras, did not abide by, as it lost its job as the Queen’s official supplier as a result of revealing details of her bra.
In 2018, Elizabeth II attended the London Fashion Week for the first time.
On this occasion, she presented the first “Elizabeth II Award for Fashion”, a reward that has been awarded annually to a new talent in this field.
For the occasion, the Queen wore a light blue tweed suit, and sat next to fashion star Anna Wintour.
