A very beautiful (and rather naughty)
By Catherine Ostler
SHE dances on a yacht, lithe and bronzed in a neon bikini, her long hair gleaming in the sun. She’s the picture of rebellion in a nightclub, sitting astride a female friend, her slim legs in revealing floral shorts and her midriff on show under her black crop top. And, again and again, pictures from her social media accounts show her pouting over cocktails and cigarettes.
So far, so thrillingly wild. But it wasn’t this side of Lady Amelia Windsor that was on show this week. On the cover of the latest edition of Tatler magazine, the granddaughter to the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Kent, is portrayed as more demure English rose than party girl. Indeed, the magazine even dubs her ‘the most beautiful member of the Royal Family’.
While you would be forgiven for not being instantly familiar with Lady Amelia, with her full lips, glossy mane and molten brown eyes, she’s tipped as the one to watch among the young royals. And although the 20-year-old student may have a delicate baby-faced beauty, she’s certainly not averse to living it up.
Indeed, other pictures from her publicly available social media accounts show her dancing at Notting Hill Carnival (that bronzed midriff on display), posing at Glastonbury Festival and smoking in the bath. She’s outspoken about her passion for Bloody Mary cocktails. And her apparent motto, as inscribed on a photo in her Instagram account? ‘Go hard or go home.’ In other words, party like you’re Prince Harry.
But Lady Amelia is no mere vacuous socialite in the making. On the contrary. She is vocal about her love for Latin, saying she is ‘crazy’ about it after studying it for A-level and is rather bookish in nature. She’s currently reading French and Italian at Edinburgh University. Indeed, a friend of hers insists that, despite appearances, she’s ‘quite quiet’.
Yet there’s no denying she comes from what one in her circle describes as ‘ historically the most fashionable and glamorous branch of the Royal Family’. And it seems that even bookworm Amelia can’t fight what’s in her genes.
HER most flamboyant relation is her aunt, Lady Helen Taylor, 51, the only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent — dubbed ‘Melons’ in her youth by the tabloids because of her busty figure. Lady Helen’s 20s were a whirlwind of endless parties and dates and she herself admits to having had ‘loads of boyfriends’. Equally as beautiful, but not remotely as edgy, is Amelia’s grandmother, the Duchess of Kent. A watercolour pale beauty, she was born Katharine Worsley in North Yorkshire, and as a piano teacher avoided the limelight. Yet her elegant and ethereal beauty is legendary, and was particularly on show when she presented the tennis trophies at Wimbledon.
But even more influential than the fashionable Lady Helen is Amelia’s great- grandmother, Princess Marina of Kent, who died in 1968. One of Amelia’s acquaintances tells me she is an absolute inspiration to the young royal.
As well as being the Queen Mother’s sister-in-law, Princess Marina was a friend of Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward. The Princess Diana of her day, she only had to wear an item once to create an instant trend. There was even a song about her, ‘She’s bought a hat like Princess Marina,’ sung by the Sixties rock band The Kinks.
The other side of Amelia, her bookish nature, comes from her father. ‘Gentle’ George, Earl of St Andrews, is the Duke and Duchess’s oldest son. Super-bright, reclusive and bespectacled, he attended Eton as an elite King’s Scholar, before going to Cambridge University, where he read history.
After a stint as a diplomat in New York and Budapest, George worked in the antiquarian book business and became chairman of an internet-based world history project at Cambridge University in 2012, before devoting himself to charitable works.
But as well as these highminded pursuits, he was also ‘almost a house husband’, according to one close to the family, in that he was very hands-on with his children’s upbringing.
His desire to bring up his three children—Edward, Lord Downpatrick, 27, Lady Marina, 23, and Amelia—in an erudite environment was reinforced by his wife, Sylvana Tomaselli.
To be frank, she is a rather exotic bride for a British Royal, even for a minor one, being not only a divorcee, a Roman Catholic, and a Canadian of Austrian lineage, but also a highly regarded academic who teaches at Cambridge University.
Sylvana is a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and specialises in 18th-century British and French political theory. She produces papers with very un-It-Girl friendly titles such as Montesquieu’s L’ Esprit des Lois from a Contemporary Feminist Point of View and Mary Wollstonecraft: The Reunification Of Domestic And Political Spheres. It’s not surprising, th then, th thatt sheh and dh her h husbandb d determined to bring up their children in a low-key, publicity-averse, tiara-shunning manner.
Religion was an important part of the children’s formative years, and both Amelia’s elder siblings converted to Catholicism, ruling themselves out of the line of succession, allowing Amelia to become 36th in line to the throne.
BY ROYAL standards, Amelia a nd her s i bli ngs’ acts of youthful rebellion have been relatively mild. No Prince Harry in a Nazi uniform-style japes here. Amelia’s brother, Edward, known as Eddy, is fashionably bearded and passionate about hunting, Formula One and cricket. While undoubtedly intelligent, when the Old Etonian went to Oxford, where he studied modern languages, he became president of the notorious hell- raising Bullingdon Club.
Lady Marina, meanwhile, is friends with Princess Eugenie. Pretty, sporty and with a penchant for skydiving, she’s again rather clever — a graduate of Edinburgh
University, she was also deputy head girl at school.
Fashion, though, was her initial calling and she did an internship at Hermes. Today, she works in Brazil at a publishing company. Sweetly, her nickname is ‘Big Win’ (after their surname Windsor) to her little sister’s ‘Little Win’.
Amelia studied art history, French and Latin for A-level. But that Windsor love for glamour kicked in at an early age. As a teenager at St Mary’s Ascot — the Berkshire boarding school that educated Princess Caroline of Monaco and Lady Antonia Fraser — Amelia had already announced her fervour for fashion.
Her first dabble came in 2010, when she and her siblings modelled for Hardy Amies. One long-term family friend said: ‘Amelia has always been crazy about fashion. She’s been talking about nothing else for years.’
And so, far from spending all her time reading Cicero, Amelia has cultivated rather more prosaic interests.
On Facebook, she declares herself a fan of British Vogue, and TV programme Beverly Hills 90210. Last month she attended the Vogue centenary party at the National Portrait Gallery and hobnobbed alongside Fifty Shades Of Grey actress Dakota Johnson and supermodel Lara Stone.
In 2013 she said her aim was to work in fashion in Paris. Indeed, she has already been an intern at Chanel in Paris, which she described as ‘one of the best experiences I’ve ever had’.
It was a natural step, then, to appear as a debutante at the Bal des Debutantes in Paris in 2013, an annual event at the Hotel de Crillon in which the world’s most privileged girls are given the chance to wear couture, taught to waltz and photographed endlessly.
Amelia, who appeared looking lovely in a silvery puff of a gown made by Lebanese couturier Elie Saab, later told Teen Vogue Magazine she had forgotten how to waltz instantly and was surprised she didn’t fall flat on her face. ‘I felt like the most spoiled girl in the world,’ she said.
And this, perhaps, sums Amelia up most succinctly. In spite of her love of glitz, she’s too well brought up to say anything brattish or embarrassing. And she’s not grand — one of her acquaintances was surprised to see her waitressing in a cafe; surely a first for a young royal.
Her gentle nature is also on show in her social media accounts. In a sweetly naive way, some of her first posts on her Instagram account — accessible to the public — were pictures of herself and her parents on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
ANOTHEr photo of her with Prince Charles on the royal balcony had the caption: ‘Chilling with the best great-uncle ever — love you Uncle Charles!’ She also welcomed Prince George to the clan by posting the official photo released by William and Kate to mark his birth saying: ‘Loving this photo of my cousin Will, his lovely wife Kate, and of course the newest addition to our family — baby George! Loving the latest, cutest and most amazing addition to the fam.’
When some strangers expressed amazement she knew Prince William, she replied: ‘Of course I’ve met baby Georgie! He’s adorable!’
Since then, Amelia has wised up, no doubt aided by her move away from her beloved parents to Edinburgh University. She’s become a member of the ‘ Castle Crew’, a party-loving set that formerly numbered Pippa Middleton, an alumna of Edinburgh. Weeknights are spent in the city’s bars and then it’s up the A9 to someone’s castle f or a shooting weekend. She’s acting in a student production of The Crucible. Indeed, according to one acquaintance, she’s weighing up whether to seek a modelling agent, or an acting agent, or both.
Before any of that can be pursued fulltime, however, she has three years of studying to go.
But despite the love of books and t he professorial influence of her parents, fashion loves a blue-blood, and this particular blue- blood loves fashion.
It’s surely only a matter of ti me before Lady Amelia’s making her way to a catwalk near you . . .