Secrets of Royal Style
Interpreting the signals sent by the Royals’ fashion choices
IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, Diana, Princess of Wales, wore a very pointed graphic sweater to a polo match. The red jumper, as the Brits would say, featured a field of white sheep and one single black sheep. It was actually a re-wear, as she had been photographed in a very similar piece once before her marriage; seemingly, she had a new, smaller sweater made up to fit her shrinking frame, itself a reflection of her distress within her marriage. This time, the black sheep was pointing the other way. On this second outing, it was clear that Diana meant to send a message, deploying g subtle wit to silently signal how w alienated she felt, how she stood d out within the royal fold.
“The black sheep jumper was, like so much of her wardrobe, big, bold and clever,” writes supreme royal watcher Elizabeth Holmes in her new book, HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style. “If you’ve ever been tempted to write off Diana’s style as ’80s excess – as I’ll confess I have on occasion – I urge you to reconsider.”
Diana is the unsurprising style star of Holmes’s new coffee-table book that decodes the style choices and messages telegraphed by the Queen, Diana and her daughters-in-law, Kate and Meghan. A former fashion reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Holmes is known for her Instagram-famous stories So Many Thoughts, where she annotates photos of Kate and Meghan with comments and critiques on their style choices. As befits the format, SMT is a quick-hit guilty pleasure of fun graphics and fast factoids juxtaposed with strong points about the
meaning behind the fashion.
There is more heft to HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style, which is a reported analysis of the strategy behind royal style choices, fleshed out with more substantive biographical and historical context. Diana is fresh fodder for the author, thus providing a new perspective for the reader and proof the princess is still relevant 23 years after her death. “Diana was thrilling to me,” says Holmes, by phone from her home base in California. “I didn’t follow her in real time. I was a little too young. I loved learning the ways she discovered fashion and how she used fashion and how much power she found from it.” Diana, she says “made me see Kate and Meghan in a different light, understanding how Diana set the stage for all this.”
As someone who vividly remembers the fairy-tale wedding of Charles and Di in 1981, reading Holmes’s take on Diana does make the high-camp ’80s style of the People’s Princess feel compelling again. She points to the hallmarks of that more-is-more look. “Diana chose clothing that photographed well, in saturated shades and bold patterns. Her dresses offered dimension, with big collars and puffy sleeves, while her hats added texture, festooned with feathers, veils and bows.”
She looked both younger than she was with all the princess-y folderol and much older than she was in the hats and poufs and peplums.
It was a suit of armour built to protect and project. Holmes’s central theory is that there is always a message in royal clothing. “The People’s Princess was a master dresser, tailoring her style not just to what she was doing or who she was meeting but how she was feeling.” So even though the Queen has, for 70 years, set the tone for appropriate royal dressing, it was Diana who pushed the envelope on what was acceptable and used fashion to display her humour, define her style and signal her changing identity during the stages of her life. In this way, she paved the way for her daughters-in-law to follow her lead and embed very strategic meaning into their own ensembles decades later.
Anyone who lived through the ’80s has watched in bemusement as younger generations try on tropes of ’80s fashionthroughitsrepeatedrunwayresurrections–even the Diana black sheep sweater has been reissued. Kate and Meghan often wink at Diana’s best looks. Fashion today can feel like a blender of random styles and eras. By contrast, the decisive clothing choices of these women and the care they take to judge time, place and context makes deciphering the messages hidden within their clothing choices a fabulous, voyeuristic parlour game, sometimes with dynastic implications.
Holmes’s American outsider lens offers her an opportunity to ask the bigger question: why are we so obsessed with the British Royal Family? Americans, says Holmes, can revel in the pomp and circumstance without investment. “Here in America, we can watch from one step back and enjoy it all.” Then in 2017, she says, “Along comes Meghan, one of us, entering this family, with her fashion-forward, relaxed-cool, sophisticated Southern California style. Suddenly there was a whole new group of royal style watchers.”
In Canada, where the Queen is still our head of state, we feel a more intimate connection to and inherent respect for royal traditions. They are “ours” in a more concrete way, and we are even more attuned to the messaging behind the pretty, fashion-centric photos. For everyone, though, the ceremonial aspect of royal life is alluring: there is comfort in arcane rituals unchanged over time, and costuming is the key to pulling off those rituals.
Think of the resplendent regalia on