HBC, HRH and the life-saving scarf…
HELENA BONHAM CARTER has played the virginal ingenue (Lucy Honeychurch), the witch (Bellatrix Lestrange) and the ghostly spinster (Miss Havisham), but, one might argue, never has costume been more integral to her character than her current gig as Princess Margaret. The Crown season three drops on 17 November and picks up slap bang in the middle of the ’60s. The promo still of Helena (above), wearing a flowered hat and ornate clip-on earrings, promises that the fashion will be every bit as tantalising as that worn by Vanessa Kirby (who played the Queen’s younger sister in the first two seasons) and her wardrobe of cat’s-eye sunglasses, checked woollen coats and satin ballgowns.
Princess Margaret was always the more experimental dresser of the two. Vanessa referred to her, rather tellingly, as ‘the badass royal’. It’s a trait that Helena relates to. She comes up with a series of questions, rather than answers, when describing her personal style: ‘Erratic? Experimental? Not beige?’ She also shares her on-screen persona’s love of getting dressed up. ‘I love clothes. Dressing each day is an opportunity to dress up,’ she says.
The next item she’ll be adding to her wardrobe, or ‘dressing-up box’ as she calls it, is a floor-sweeping scarf she designed as part of a collaboration between Brora and Save the Children. She, Erin O’connor and Laura Bailey have each created a six-piece capsule for the Scottish knitwear brand, available from today. More than 80% of its sales will be donated to the children’s charity. The do-good sensibility is literally woven into the clothes. For example, Helena’s striped scarf is emblazoned with the words ‘Phenomenal Woman’ – an homage to Maya Angelou’s poems by the same name – and mimics the Suffragette movement’s ‘Votes For Women’ sash.
‘At first, it looked a bit like a football scarf, but then I thought, that’s a good thing. Football is tribal, and we deserve our own team colours,’ says Helena. She also wants her daughter to take Maya Angelou’s message to heart: that real appeal comes from the inside and not the outside. ‘I wanted to make a scarf for my soon-to-be teenage daughter, and to furnish her with a confidence that will keep today’s social media terrors and “dislikes” at bay.’ How does her fellow contributor Erin O’connor describe Helena’s scarf ? ‘I think it’s feminism at its finest.’ Would Princess Margaret agree? One suspects so.