Maple Leaf dress dazzled Canada
Young Queen wore it during post-coronation visit here
OTTAWA – With all of Britain immersed in a weekend of supreme pageantry celebrating the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, details about how Canada’s main history museum will mark this year’s Diamond Jubilee have quietly emerged.
And taking centre stage at the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s planned Jubilee exhibition — scheduled to open on July 1 and run until early 2013 — will be a 55-year-old, mapleleaf-emblazoned dress that was worn by the Queen during her first post-Coronation visit to Canada in 1957.
The dress — adorned with a garland of bejewelled, green leaves — is among 60 artifacts to be displayed in the exhibit titled A Queen and Her Country at the Gatineau, Que., history centre.
Other objects in the chronologically themed tribute to the Queen’s close relationship with Canada include a handcrafted porcelain vase celebrating her Coronation in 1953 and souvenirs recalling a 2002 royal visit during which Elizabeth dropped the puck for a ceremonial faceoff at the start of a Vancouver Canucks game.
But the Maple Leaf of Canada Dress from 1957 is highlighted by the museum as the exhibition’s central artifact.
The country was enthralled with the 31-year-old Queen when she arrived in Ottawa in October of that year, in time to become the first monarch in Canadian history to deliver the throne speech and open Parliament.
The leafy dress, created by British fashion designer Norman Hartnell, won widespread media coverage. “Second only to her dazzling coronation gown of this afternoon was the Queen’s Maple Leaf of Canada Dress,” the Globe and Mail reported at the time.