This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Justine Picardie, formerly editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar and features director at Vogue, knows her fashion. As the wife of a godson of Prince Philip, she also knew the late Queen. Of course, nobody bar a very small circle really knew the monarch, but Picardie was close enough to find herself having a tête-à-tête in a Balmoral bothy about the Queen’s memories of the couturier Hardy Amies, who had worked as a senior intelligence officer for the Special Operations Executive during the War. “Ah yes,” the Queen remarked wryly. “Those rumours that he was very good at garroting Nazis … ”
This anecdote sets the tone for Picardie’s book. If you are looking for a simple account of what the Queen wore over the decades, you will not find it here. (Try the exhibition Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style instead, which runs at The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace until October.)
Picardie tells a much more wide-ranging story of the Royal Family from the First World War until the 1953 Coronation, which is as much about the Queen’s parents, uncle and aunt by marriage as it is about herself, and as much about politics as about fashion.
The broad sweep of the narrative, about the family’s reinvention as the Windsors, the abdication crisis, the steadfast determination to remain in wartime London, the young Princess Elizabeth’s courtship with Philip Mountbatten and the Coronation, will be familiar to serious readers of royal history. But sartorial anecdotes, based on scrupulous research in the royal archives, add texture and colour to a well-known story.
Picardie gives an intriguing account of the ways in which relationships with couturiers brought the royals into contact with the world of espionage. Designers’ experience as confidants to wide networks of international clients made them useful to the government. Edward Molyneux provided intelligence assistance to the secret services during the war, relocating to London but retaining his Paris shop as a meeting point for espionage contacts.
Hardy Amies, a dedicated monarchist with invaluable experience of living in Germany, combined fashion with a full-time job as a military intelligence officer.
Further afield, Elsa Schiaparelli (the subject of another current London exhibition, at the V&A), much beloved of Wallis Simpson, was monitored by the FBI. And Simpson was also a client of the Russian-born designer Anna Wolkoff, who was overtly pro-Nazi and eventually imprisoned for spying. Given Edward and Wallis’s own dubious leanings, direct contact with such designers must have given the British security services many a headache.
Picardie sheds interesting new light on how sartorial matters had a bearing on the couple’s shameful political encounters. Wallis’s focus, in her reminiscences of visits to Nazi Germany, upon smart uniforms, sparkling medals, fabrics, soft furnishings, and the pretty dresses and hair-dos of Goebbels’s wife sums up the dangerous superficiality of the pair.
Back at home in Britain, fashion became a key tool in demonstrating the patriotism of the core members of the Royal Family. A royal directive of the 1930s decreed that ladies attending court should wear dresses of London design. Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth II painstakingly “dressed British” and became ambassadors for the British fashion industry.
Prominent British royals have favoured British designers ever since, most importantly for wedding dresses. (Wallis Simpson’s choice of the American, Paris-based design house Mainbocher for hers feels like a not-so-subtle twos-up.) There were even concerns about the provenance of silkworms for Elizabeth II’s Coronation dress: worms from Italy or Japan simply wouldn’t do.
Clothes were vital to the Royal Family’s image formation, cosy, conservative fashion choices contributing to the establishment of “us four” (George VI, Elizabeth and the two princesses) as the über-respectable family unit. Fashion was also a way of emphasising tradition, lineage and continuity. George VI instructed Norman Hartnell, in dressing his wife, to take inspiration from a painting of Queen Victoria by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
George wore military uniforms throughout the war, Elizabeth elegant tailored outfits with pearls, even when standing amidst the ruins of part of Buckingham Palace, the embodiment of keeping calm and carrying on. Meanwhile, the Duchess of Windsor, bored in the Bahamas, flitted from New York to Palm Beach on extravagant shopping trips.
Royal sartorial choices have often been used as a tool of diplomacy. Hartnell incorporated French fabrics and details into Queen Elizabeth’s dazzling all-white wardrobe for a state visit to Paris in 1938 that had to knock the socks off a recent visit by Hitler to Mussolini’s Rome. But clothing and jewels, and what one did with them, could also be weaponised.
It is fascinating to learn of the ways in which the royals used sartorial choices to attack one another. Edward VIII rebelled against his parents in his own dapper yet casual mode of dress, complaining that “we had a buttoned-up childhood, in every sense of the word”.
Sometimes this mutinous streak emerged spitefully, such as when he had his late father’s favourite diamond tiepins dismantled and refashioned as embellishments for Wallis’s powder compact and comb. The gesture was the ultimate insult: George V not only felt antipathy towards Wallis but couldn’t abide seeing women wearing make-up.
Fashion, in royal hands, became a form of branding, a way of defining a persona in the public eye, and of distinguishing and distancing oneself from other family members. During the 1930s Queen Elizabeth cultivated an increasingly soft, feminine style, favouring dusty pastel shades and adding ever more frills and feathers in opposition to the angular, modernist style favoured by Wallis Simpson, whose look Picardie calls “hard chic”.
Simpson was equally up for playing the game, determining to “dress to kill” and making provocative choices such as a daring Schiaparelli dress whose skirt featured a lobster — heavy on sexual symbolism — designed by Salvador Dalí.
The echoes of all this symbolic game-playing seem to ring down the generations. There was much speculation about the late Queen’s choice of a blue hat embellished with yellow flowers, reminiscent of the European Union flag, for the state opening of Parliament in 2017.
Keen-eyed royal watchers also recently observed an occasion when prominent members of the Royal Family, including the King, Prince and Princess of Wales, and Duchess of Gloucester, were spotted simultaneously at separate events in grey tailoring, in what appeared to be a coordinated response to Prince Harry’s recent remarks about his family being controlled by “grey men in suits”. Trivial coincidences or coded trolling?
We so rarely hear the royals’ voices, but image is everything for them — remembering the Queen’s old adage about having to be seen to be believed — and clothes, as Picardie engagingly demonstrates, speak volumes.
