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Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Thursday aged 96 after reigning for more than 70 years, definitely had a uniform. In her early years on the throne, in her 20s and 30s, the young queen was known to wear practical yet elegant clothes. She wore clean-lined dresses and full skirts to formal events and expertly tailored suits and skirts during the day, skimpy at the neckline and sharp at the waist. And in her later years, of course, her taste for modest, traditional elegance was distilled into what we now know as her usual public dress, which, as many have pointed out, communicated the solidity and stability of crown even as united. The kingdom evolved dramatically in the 20th and 21st centuries.
But the Queen’s wardrobe was constantly imbued with deeper meanings, seen as conveying support or love for other countries and communities, or even exercising power when necessary. And because Elizabeth’s reign began in 1952, a time before women were regularly seen in the highest levels of government in the Western world, she helped set a standard in women’s attire near politics.
Queen Elizabeth’s public image was “all 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 have controlled their public images.
The Queen’s style at home varied little, Mansell notes: “In her last photograph, greeting Liz Truss, her last Prime Minister, she is very simply dressed in a woolen skirt, woolen cardigan and woolen jacket.” which, for a certain generation of Englishmen. people, is “just like everybody’s aunt or mother.”
But in public, and especially in her later years, “I think she always wanted to be two things: reassuring and distinct,” says Mansel. Being an instantly identifiable pillar of color was her way of “trying to put people at ease, despite all the changes going on.”
Malcolm Barnard, 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 might be assumed to be the values of a ruling class—those of resistance to change, the desire for continuity, the continuity of their dominant positions, for example.
Indeed, Queen Elizabeth insisted on a fairly formal dress code for royal events. Once, in 2002, she chastised a BBC cameraman at a Royal Ascot event for failing to wear a top hat and tails. The elegant but modest daytime dress code that Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle, Camilla Parker Bowles and others have strictly followed in their time as members of the royal family is a tradition that dates back to Elizabeth’s mother and grandmother, says Mansel.
The only person who tried to break the mold, Mansel adds, was Princess Diana. Her style, especially when married to the now-King Charles III, deviated subtly from the royal formula, sometimes incorporating more masculine or girlish touches, such as military-style double-breasted jackets and the occasional waist dress.
However, Queen Elizabeth, who has been called “a link between the end of an empire and the beginning of a cosmopolitan liberal democracy”, helped cement the contemporary uniform for powerful women, prevalent during her time on the throne. Mid-length, boxy skirt suits 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, a bit like the Queen’s, and always a handbag”.
The Queen also helped maintain a strong tradition of “fashion diplomacy”. As Bethan Holt writes in the 2022 book The Queen: 70 Years of Grand Style, the monarch has long been known for incorporating small, thoughtful touches that nod to local culture when she travels. On the queen’s state visit to Ireland in 2011, Holt writes, when she was eager to repair relations with the neighboring nation, she wore a deep green wool coat and matching green-print silk dress upon arrival and in 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 gown with Swarovski crystal maple leaves sparkling over 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 she visited in 1961, and a dress in shades of heather and thistle for to show her love for Scotland after the formation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
And as Mansel points out, she also occasionally chose colors that asserted her power. After meeting the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom, she wore red to match the cardinal’s red robes: “To say that she was as holy and holy, in the eyes of her”.
The Queen’s particular habit of communicating through small details has flourished in the political world. Princess Diana wore a red polka dot dress in Japan in 1986, an obvious homage to the country’s sunrise flag. First lady Jill Biden wore an embroidered sunflower 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 she served as US Secretary of State. And in the UK, Brenda Hale, the president of the Supreme Court, caused a stir when she wore a pin in the shape of a spider to deliver her verdict on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament in 2019. “Some of us remembered whose Song, ‘Boris The Spider,'” Barnard wrote, while others pondered Walter Scott’s “tangled web” of lies and deceit in his 1808 poem “Marmion.”
Of course, a particular tradition of fashion diplomacy has also flourished: wearing clothes 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 United Kingdom, Ivanka Trump wore ensembles from British designers such as Safiyaa, Burberry and Alessandra Rich. The tradition can be traced back to Mary Todd Lincoln, who wore dresses designed by a formerly enslaved fashion designer, Elizabeth Keckley.
Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, almost always wore the work of British designers, a tradition dating 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 made the ladies of his court do it.”
After all, the Queen sat at the head of a monarchy known for its colonization and conquest, and her insistence on English-made designs could be seen as consistent with the British Empire’s history of promoting its supremacy.
However, says Mansel, the queen’s clothes were not typically controversial. They were acclaimed, 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.”
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