THE FASHION QUEEN GOES GLOBAL

Some believe that Elizabeth was wearing jeans at the exact moment she became Queen, when her father passed away in his sleep at Sandringham on 6 February 1952 while she was on a safari holiday in Kenya.

She arrived back in Britain without a black mourning outfit and was forced to wait on her plane while one was brought for her to change into, but the new Queen was already beginning to assert her own mind.

‘Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning,’ her grandmother, Queen Mary, admonished when she greeted her. At her father’s funeral a week later, her mother wore a skirt that reached to the floor, while the new Queen’s dress hovered a few inches above her ankles, a subtle but sure sign that this was a sovereign with her own way of doing things.

Thoughts soon turned to the most important outfit of the Queen’s reign – her coronation gown. Hartnell was once again entrusted with the commission. ‘Her Majesty told me graciously that the dress was triumphant,’ he said. She later compared it to wearing a radiator, too.

Women everywhere sought to copy the new Queen’s looks, which wasn’t always easy given most of her outfits were couture creations. In October 1952, she caused a sensation when she arrived at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square wearing a blazer-style gown by Hartnell. Manufacturers rushed to make copies of the fashionforward dress and even those on a budget could emulate Her Majesty after a 30p paper pattern was produced. It’s a vanishingly rare example of the monarch channelling menswear. The dress, dubbed the ‘Magpie’, was never worn again.

Hartnell and Hardy Amies created around 150 outfits for the Queen for her six-month tour of the Commonwealth in 1953. But it was frocks from another source that sparked some of the tour’s most exciting fashion moments – cotton dresses in dainty prints by Horrockses Fashions, a British ready-to-wear label. The frocks were by no means cheap (£4 to £7, the equivalent of an average week’s wages), but women would save up. They were ubiquitous in certain circles – one fashion editor reported counting 41 Horrockses dresses when she was holidaying in Madeira. Although the company offered to keep the Queen’s dress choices exclusive, she declined, allowing them to be bought by other women once she’d worn them.

This directive was a gift for the fashion pages… ‘Queen does not mind seeing the same dress on someone else’ and ‘Copy Her Majesty, her dresses are here’. Reporters praised ‘our Royal family, who have done so much in their travels abroad to build up worldwide prestige of British fashions’ and were now ‘doing as much for the ready-to-wear industry as for haute couture’.

1953 In Bermuda, in a frock from her ‘tourdrobe’

1953 At her father’s funeral in a ‘too short’ mourning dress