For centuries, royal women and men have been known for their standout style. There was Princess Margaret’s mid-century collaboration with Dior, and Princess Caroline of Monaco and Charlotte Casiraghi maintain an ongoing relationship with Chanel. The royal wardrobe has also been used to make political statements: Think Queen Rania of Jordan’s liberated, feminist wardrobe. From promoting their respective countries’ couture houses to honoring ancient traditions, royal dressing walks a line between informing and impressing the masses.
“These royal characters are actors,” royal historian Robert Lacey once said, “and the clothes they are wearing are stage costumes.”
It’s no secret that royal fashion is also big business. If Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, or Queen Letizia of Spain are photographed in a particular dress or holding a certain handbag, it can sell out within minutes. The phenomenon has been dubbed the “Kate effect” and dates back to when the blue wrap dress by Issa that she wore to her 2010 engagement photocall sold out almost instantly. Last month, Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex (whose sartorial influence and ability to boost sales of the brands she wears is similarly called “the Meghan effect”), monetized the obsession with her stealth luxury style by launching a ShopMy page, where some of her favorites by designers and brands—including Loro Piana, Heidi Merrick, Dôen, and Veronica Beard—can be purchased with a click of a button (and she may sometimes receive commission from the sale of certain products).
But royal trendsetters are nothing new. During the reign of Henry VIII of England from 1509 to 1547, the peacocking king was considered “the best-dressed sovereign in the world.” His wives were equally as fashionable, with Queen Catherine popularizing Spanish styles of dress, and Anne Boleyn scandalizing conservatives with her revealing French court dresses and hoods, which were quickly adopted by aristocrats throughout the country.
His daughter Queen Elizabeth I would master using her elaborate gowns to convey her majesty and authority. With her large ruffs and enormous gowns covered in jewels and allegorical symbols, Elizabeth’s clothing were theatrical uniforms of power. “Portraits often focus very little on Elizabeth’s face, and she instead becomes a companion to her clothing,” Rosie Harte writes in The Royal Wardrobe. “She is not a woman, but rather just another aspect of the symbolism of the monarchy.”
Aristocratic courtiers clamored to imitate the “Virgin Queen.” According to Harte, women aimed to copy their sovereign’s bedazzled style, and frequently dyed their hair red in honor of the flame-haired queen.
Another sovereign who used the royal style to set himself apart was Louis XIV of France. The Sun King, like many monarchs, enforced strict sumptuary laws that stipulated what his subjects were allowed to wear. At the court of Versailles, courtiers bankrupted themselves by dressing elaborately enough to please the king, thus enriching textile factories Louis supported and helping to make France the center of the fashion world.
The finest clothes and jewels were, of course, for Louis XIV himself. He is also credited with popularizing the red-soled shoe long before Christian Louboutin. “As the French king was very small, he ordered that the soles in his shoes be underlaid with cork and covered in red leather; the color of kings,” Luise Wackerl writes in Royal Style: A History of Aristocratic Fashion Icons.
French royal fashion would reach its zenith with Marie Antoinette during the 1770s and 1780s, leading Wackerl to dub her one of history’s “first It girls.”
“It is my belief that [Marie Antoinette] identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival,” Caroline Weber writes in Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. “Initiating a lifelong series of bold stylistic experiments (which one aristocratic contemporary described as constituting ‘a veritable revolution in dress’), she challenged received wisdom about the kind and the extent of the power that a French royal consort ought to possess.”
Elegant and graceful, Marie Antoinette was the perfect mannequin for haute couture. From the start, she chafed against established court traditions, initially refusing to wear the painful, diamond-studded grand corps, a corset reserved for the highest-ranking at Versailles. She threw away the usual cumbersome riding skirts for breeches, shocking the court and inspiring liberated aristocratic women to follow her lead.
Throughout the 1770s, the queen and her “minster of fashion,” designer Rose Bertin, conducted these “bold stylistic experiments,” creating fantastically ornamented robes. Along with the diva hairdresser Léonard Autié, they brought the French pouf to new heights. Marie Antoinette’s hair was padded and powdered fabulously high, adorned with everything from miniature boats to celebrate a French naval victory, garden scenes featuring fruits and vegetables, and even a “pouf à l’inoculation” to celebrate the queen convincing the king to get the smallpox vaccine.
The public clamored to copy Marie Antoinette’s whimsical excess. “She was quite naturally imitated by all women,” courtier Madame Campan wrote, per Weber. “They wanted to have immediately the exact same ornamentation for their dresses as Her Majesty did; to wear the same feathers and garlands which her beauty (then at its peak) imbued with infinite charm.”
The printing press soon began disseminating Marie Antoinette’s style across Europe. “In response to the feminine public’s boundless fascination with the trendsetting consort,” Weber writes, “the production of French fashion plates and illustrated ‘fashion almanacs’ underwent a massive explosion.”
Many of these almanacs featured illustrations that were clearly modeled after the Queen herself.
With her typical generosity, Marie Antoinette also allowed Bertin and Léonard to keep their Paris salons open, meaning that any French woman with enough money could dress in the same mode as their fashionable queen. This was surprisingly democratic, as royal family members often insisted their dressmakers work for them and other nobles alone.
But in the early 1780s, Marie Antoinette grew increasingly frustrated with cumbersome, heavy court gowns and the strict protocol of Versailles. In an act of rebellion, she and Bertin created a radically simple new style of dress: the ethereal, unstructured robe à la polonaise, a light dress made in muslin rather than silk, inspired by Colonial styles worn in the Caribbean.
While conservatives decried the queen cosplaying as a country milk maid, and blamed her for bankrupting poor shop girls and decimating the French silk industry, women embraced the new, freeing style. By 1782, the streets were filled with women in plain white dresses.
“By one of those contradictions that are more common in France than anywhere else,” wrote a contemporary observer, cited by Weber, “even as the people were criticizing the Queen for her outfits, they continued to imitate her. Every woman wanted to have the same déshabillé, the same bonnet, that they had seen her wear.”
The advent of colorized fashion plates and photography would supercharge the importance of royal fashion in the 19th century, making royals into cover girls. Although she is now remembered for her heavy black widow’s weeds of later years, as a young woman, Queen Victoria delighted in playing with dolls that were clothed in the latest fashion.
She had a hand in popularizing the tradition of wearing white, as she did for her 1840 wedding day, when she opted for the snowy shade instead of the gold and silver usually preferred by royal brides.
“By choosing white, Victoria was not only making it clear that she wished to marry as a bride rather than a queen, she was also presenting an attainable standard of wedding fashion for a much greater majority of her subjects to aspire to,” Harte writes. “The publicity that the marriage of a young and popular queen brought meant that reports of Victoria’s wedding dress travelled far and wide, giving white wedding dresses the boost in popularity they needed to become a fixture in bridal fashion.”
After Victoria retreated from the fashion scene following Prince Albert’s death, her Danish daughter-in-law Princess Alexandra picked up the slack. “Alexandramania” ensued, Harte writes, with everyday Britons clamoring to wear cheaper versions of her diamond chokers (which she wore to hide a small scar), use decorative canes (which she used to aid a limp), and copy her nautical and menswear-influenced style.
On the continent, royal fashion plates were making their own waves. Empress Eugenie of France, described by Harte as “the empress born to be a dressmaker,” popularized the romantic, unwieldy hooped gowns of Charles Frederick Worth. Even her preferred turquoise color became iconic—Wackerl links it to the origin of the famous “Tiffany Blue.” In Austria, the tragic beauty Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, became a fashion icon with her legendary floor-length hair and cinched fairytale gowns that showed off her tiny waist, which she also highlighted by being sewn into skin-tight riding costumes.
The next royal trendsetter was not a fashionable woman but rather Edward, Prince of Wales. In the 1920s, the rebellious prince became a mainstay in newsreels around the world by embracing the casual Ivy League look of American college students and switching from outdated braces to belts. “Such phenomenal interest is taken in what H.R.H. wears that, as soon as he appears in any innovation, a detailed description is cabled to the ends of the earth,” Vogue declared in a 1934 article headlined “H.R.H. Started It.”
After he abdicated from the throne so he could marry American Wallis Simpson, the glamorous, dissipated couple continued to be chic fashion icons. Perpetually on the best-dressed list, Wallis’s high-neck gowns and narrow column dresses became all the rage. The newly christened Duchess of Windsor’s “Wallis blue” buttoned-up wedding dress was designed by courtier Main Rousseau Bocher, who reportedly created the color to match her eyes.
Chic Wallis, a noted shopaholic, favored cutting-edge designers like Mainbocher, Dior, and Schiaparelli, and she took her role as trendsetter very seriously. According to Caroline Blackwood’s The Last of the Duchess, a 1944 article in the American Mercury discussed the phenomenon:
To give a real picture of the Duchess, I must describe her clothes. In them—it sounds harsh, but it is true—a large part of her personality resides. And she spares no effort to put it there. She has lost none of her flair for style. It had become one of her prime passions. She is proud to be called the best-dressed woman in the world. It is a profession with her.
As mass media made the differences between entertainment stars and royalty increasingly negligible, the American movie star Grace Kelly further blurred the lines when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956. Her pearl-covered high-neck lace wedding dress (an inspiration for countless brides, including Princess Kate) was even made by MGM’s Helen Rose, who had styled her in Hollywood.
Princess Grace popularized sophisticated, ladylike styles—pearls, short white gloves, soft yellows—and favored Chanel, Lanvin, and Dior. And, of course, there was the iconic oversized Hermès travel bag, which was renamed the “Kelly Bag.” Every season representatives from Paris couture houses would send Kelly the latest designs, knowing her choices would be printed all over the world. “Even when the princess used a Hermès silk scarf as a sling for her broken arm, everybody copied her,” Wackerl writes.
But it was another blond bombshell whose influence on fashion and culture would outlast all other royal trendsetters. From the moment Princess Diana stepped out in her iconic wedding dress in 1981, all eyes were on the 5’10” willowy aristocrat.
“It was like doing our own catwalk show with the most famous woman on the planet,” the dress’s co-designer Elizabeth Emanuel recalled. “We wanted Diana to love it, but for everyone else we wanted them to see a fairy-tale dress, like a Disney movie.”
The evolution of Princess Diana’s style is part of the reason she continues to inspire fashionistas today. “Diana’s gowns are like mini individual biographies, and put together, they tell the story of one of the greatest style icons,” Wackerl writes.
As Eloise Moran notes in The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes, Diana grew along with her wardrobe, creating iconic looks every step of the way. Diana evolved from a shy virginal “queen of cottage core” royal fiancée in Laura Ashley, to the glamourous shoulder-padded “Dynasty Di” in gowns by Bruce Oldfield and Catherine Walker, to the sleek, bodycon revenge looks of a liberated woman in Versace, Jacques Azagury, Valentino, and Ralph Lauren.
“She figured that if people were going to be obsessed with how she looked and what she wore, Ok. Embrace it, use it, leverage it,” journalist Patrick Jephson, Diana’s former equerry, noted. “Diana knew that she was always on parade.”
Often overlooked is just how innovative some of Diana’s fashion statements were. Her cheeky black sheep sweater and “I’m a Luxury” knit, androgynous tuxedos, veiled headbands, and causal use of a priceless necklace as a headwrap showed that even high-end fashion could be fun. But in many ways, it’s her love of casual athleisure wear, collegiate sweatshirts, biker shorts, and old Reeboks that continues to be imitated.
“She was unquestionably the first major figure to mix a casual sportswear wardrobe with what I like to call ‘fuck-off’ handbags—a Gucci Bamboo suede tote, a Tod’s D leather shoulder bag, and a one-of-a-kind Versace crocodile bag were among her favorites—her pieces of very expensive armor,” Moran writes.
For her daughters-in-law, it’s a tough act to follow. When Kate Middleton burst onto the scene in her polished, preppy wardrobe, she became known as the Queen of High Street, wearing affordable brands like Topshop and Zara. “Her off-the-rack wardrobe introduced a new and novel idea to the Firm,” Elizabeth Holmes writes in HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style. “‘Royals, they’re just like us!’ They’re obviously not.”
From the start, the Kate effect was a major player in the market. The internet supercharged the effect, with websites devoted exclusively to “What Kate Wore.”
Over the years, Kate has raised the profile of many British brands and made companies like Goat (now Jane Atelier) and Reiss major players in the fashion industry. As her style has become more sophisticated and regal, she has favored brands like LK Bennett (makers of her favorite nude pumps), Erdem, Emilia Wickstead, Alexander McQueen, Boden, and Jenny Packham, while still showing up in fast fashion favorites like & Other Stories.
Her sister-in-law Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has similarly become a trendsetter, and has embraced the role in her post-working-royal life. She promotes and invests in women-led brands like Cesta Collective.
“Times where I know there is a global spotlight, and attention will be given to each detail of what I may or may not be wearing, then I support designers that I have really great friendships with, and smaller up-and-coming brands that haven’t gotten the attention that they should be getting,” Meghan told The New York Times recently. “That’s one of the most powerful things that I’m able to do, and that’s simply wearing, like, an earring.”
Catherine, Princess of Wales, briefly seemed to be going in the opposite direction. In response to a February 2025 Times article claiming that the palace would no longer release details of Kate’s outfits, a source told Vanity Fair: “She feels too much is written about what she is wearing and she really wants the focus to be on the work she is doing,” But days later, Kensington Palace clarified their policy, stating it would continue to share details for special occasions. And thus, the royal fashion juggernaut continues, as it has for hundreds of years.
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