Queen Elizabeth Fashion Icon Yes.

An earlier version of this report incorrectly reported that Queen Elizabeth II died on Friday. He died on Thursday. For decades now, it’s been relatively easy to dress up – for Halloween, perhaps, or for giggles at any royal wedding or jubilee party – as the Queen of England. All one needs, so the common wisdom goes, is a bold solid-colored box-skirt suit with a pin on the left shoulder, a matching hat (or, for extra credit, an umbrella) and white gloves, with a bag gently swinging on one forearm. And maybe a white wig. Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Thursday at the age of 96 after more than 70 years of reign, undoubtedly had an outfit. In her early years on the throne, in her 20s and 30s, the young queen was known to wear practical but stylish clothes. She wore clean-lined gowns and full skirts to formal events and elegantly tailored skirts and dresses during the day, without daring necklines and nipped in at the waist. And in her later years, of course, her taste for modest, traditional elegance distilled into what we now know as her usual public-revealing attire, which as many have pointed out, conveys the consistency and stability of the crown even as United Kingdom has evolved dramatically in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the Queen’s wardrobe has always been imbued with deeper meanings, seen as conveying support or affection for other countries and communities, or even asserting power when necessary. And because Elizabeth’s reign began in 1952, a time before women regularly appeared at the highest levels of government in the Western world, she helped set a standard for women’s clothing that adjoins politics. Queen Elizabeth’s public image was “totally smart, clean, which I think was a very 1950s thing, really. Not much fuss,” says Philip Mansel, a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London and the author of Dressed to Rule, a book about how rulers control their public images. The Queen’s style at home varied slightly, notes Mansel: “In her last picture, greeting Liz Truss, her last prime minister, she is dressed very simply in a woolen skirt and a woolen flannel and a woolen jacket,” which, for a certain generation English people, they are “just like the aunt or mother of all of us”. But in public, and especially in her later years, “I think she always wanted to be two things: reassuring and recognizable,” says Mansel. Being an instantly recognizable pillar of color was her way of “trying to reassure people, despite all the changes going on.” Malcolm Barnard, the author of “Fashion as Communication,” wrote in an email to the Washington Post that this “type of clothing exemplifies values ​​that are homologous to or fit with what one might assume to be the values ​​of a ruling class – those of resistance to change, desire for continuity, the continuity of their dominant positions, for example. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth famously insisted on a rather formal dress code for royal events. Once, in 2002, he chastised a BBC cameraman at a Royal Ascot event for not wearing a hat and tails. The elegant but modest dress code strictly adhered to by Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle, Camilla Parker Bowles and others in their time as members of the royal family is a tradition that dates back to Elizabeth’s mother and grandmother, Mansel says. The one person who tried to break the mold, Mansel adds, was Princess Diana. Her style, especially while married to current King Charles III, subtly deviated from the royal formula, sometimes incorporating more masculine or girlish touches, such as double-breasted military-style jackets and the occasional drop-waist dress. Still, Queen Elizabeth, who has been called “the link between the end of an empire and the beginning of a cosmopolitan liberal democracy,” helped establish the modern outfit for powerful women, which proliferated during her time on the throne. Suits, mid-length skirts are still seen in United States government buildings and on women in politics throughout the Western world. And Mansel points out that Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first female prime minister, wore “slightly formal clothes, slightly Queen-like, and always a bag”. The Queen has also helped to maintain a strong tradition of ‘fashion diplomacy’. As Bethan Holt writes in her 2022 book The Queen: 70 Years of Majestic Style, the monarch has long been known to incorporate small, thoughtful touches that fit local culture when she travels. On the Queen’s state visit to Ireland in 2011, Holt writes, when she wanted to mend relations with the neighboring nation, she wore a deep green wool crepe coat and a matching green-print silk dress on arrival and to a state dinner. she wore a dress adorned with more than 2,000 tiny silk shamrocks. At a dinner at In Canada in 2010, the Queen wore a white lace dress with Swarovski crystal maple leaves sparkling on her shoulders. She wore a dress embroidered with California poppies to meet President Ronald Reagan in 1983, a dress with an emerald and white train like the Pakistani flag when he visited in 1961, and an outfit in shades of heather and thistle to show her love for Scotland with the formation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. And as Mansel points out, she occasionally chose colors that affirmed her power. When she met the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the UK, she wore red to match the cardinal’s red robes: “To say she was equally holy and holy, in her eyes.” The Queen’s particular habit of communicating minute details has flourished in the political world. Princess Diana wore a red polka dot dress to Japan in 1986, a clear homage to the rising nation’s flag. First Lady Jill Biden wore a sunflower embroidered on a royal-blue dress in March this year to signal support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Madeleine Albright chose her pins strategically when serving as US Secretary of State. And in the UK, Brenda Hale, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, made headlines when she wore a spider-shaped pin to deliver her verdict on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament in 2019. “Some of us remembered the Who song, ‘Boris The Spider’, Barnard wrote, while others considered Walter Scott’s ‘tangled web’ of lies and deception in his 1808 poem ‘Marmion’. The Madeleine Albright “diplomacy pin” is in the State Department museum Of course, a distinct tradition of fashion diplomacy has also flourished: wearing clothing designed by a member of a particular community as a sign of respect or support. When she visited India in 2009, first lady Michelle Obama wore a cream strapless dress and skirt designed by Indian-American designers Naeem Khan and Rachel Roy, respectively. On a 2019 visit to the UK, Ivanka Trump wore ensembles from British designers including Safiyaa, Burberry and Alessandra Rich. The tradition can be traced back to Mary Todd Lincoln, who wore dresses designed by a former enslaved designer, Elizabeth Keckley. Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, almost always wore the work of British designers, a tradition that dates back centuries to monarchs like King Louis XIV, who, Mansel notes, “was obsessed with launching the French fashion industry. So he wore French silk, French embroidery, French lace, above all, to do better than Venetian lace, and he had the ladies of his court do this.’ Assessment: Queen Elizabeth II did her job The Queen, after all, sat at the head of a monarchy known for colonization and conquest, and her insistence on English designs could be seen as in keeping with the British Empire’s history of promoting its own supremacy. However, says Mansel, the Queen’s outfits were not usually controversial. They were appreciated, both inside and outside the UK. “A lot of French people liked her clothes,” for example, “because they weren’t French. They were different,” says Mansel. “They represented Britain.”