DRESSING THE QUEEN: Two Hundred Years of Craft, Couture, and Monarchy, by Kate Strasdin
For all the tabloid ruckus that certain wayward members of her family are wont to generate, the image of a dutiful, faultlessly dignified Queen Elizabeth II remains a touchstone for admirers of the British monarchy. An exhibition currently on view at Buckingham Palace offers an unusually intimate look at the clothing that helped to define that image.
It is the most extensive exhibit ever mounted of the late monarch’s clothing, encompassing more than 300 garments and accessories that trace her life from childhood to the end of her 70-year reign. To view these artifacts is to understand that, for Elizabeth as for so many queens throughout history, clothes were always more than “just” clothes. They could function as statecraft or diplomacy, patriotic advertisement or even personal amusement. Elizabeth’s own signature ensemble — a brightly colored coat and matching dress, a fanciful hat and sensible, low-heeled pumps — functioned as a kind of uniform, indispensable to the performance of her royal duties and indeed of royalty itself. As she herself famously put it: “I have to be seen to be believed.”
And yet, the queen’s instantly recognizable persona was never the work of a single designer. It was the collective creation of armies of skilled laborers, men and women who cut, sewed, tailored, embroidered, wove, braided, fitted and otherwise constructed its multiple component parts, whether Norwich cashmere shawls or Norman Hartnell gowns. In her illuminating new study, “Dressing the Queen,” Kate Strasdin reconstitutes the lives and labors of the “many hands” that, since the age of Elizabeth II’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, have shaped the sartorial contours of the British queen.
A costume historian at Falmouth University and the author of “The Dress Diary,” Strasdin characterizes her project as turning the focus away from Victoria and Elizabeth themselves, and “onto the artisans who, garment by garment, brought all of their skills to the creation of objects that would become a part of the iconography of royalty, whilst themselves remaining almost entirely hidden.”
Each of the book’s chapters focuses on a different area of expertise and, drawing on copious archival research, links a handful of heretofore obscure life stories to each of the categories in the queen’s wardrobe, from robes of state and tiaras to riding habits and trench coats.
Strasdin does a marvelous job of describing the (often insalubrious) conditions in which her subjects toiled and the specific, highly exacting nature of their work. She also endeavors to connect, wherever possible, an individual human face and identity to the persons whose professional efforts she chronicles.
Because for the most part the skilled laborers she examines did not, in contrast to the queens they served, leave extensive records for posterity, Strasdin often encounters documentary voids that she cannot fill. Her response is to engage in modest bouts of speculation. For instance, of the silk-weaver George Doré: “I wonder what he felt in that last moment of creation, as the final thread of bright petunia was woven into the cloth of Queen Alexandra’s velvet robe,” she writes. “Did he purchase souvenir editions of the newspapers recording details of the coronation ceremony that took place on 9 August 1902?”
Introducing 17-year-old Ethel Oatham, listed in 1911 census records as working with her sister Delia on high-end “ladies’ dress trimmings,” she asks: “Did Ethel twist and loop silken cords or weave the dizzying varieties of braid? Perhaps she sat with her older sister and constructed he bands of fringe ready to be stitched to the hem of a fine gown.”
And a Miss Reid, of the firm that produced Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s beloved Balmoral tartan: “Did she enjoy being the sole female employee amongst all of the male tailors and makers, or did she dread each day as she took up her place in the workshop?”
The obscurity of these dedicated workers stands in arresting contrast to the matchlessly high profile of the garments they produced: a point that Strasdin makes repeatedly throughout the book’s 18 chapters. “Their individual names might sometimes be lost, but their work remains intact.”
Although she never mentions Karl Marx — an almost exact contemporary of Queen Victoria’s (she was one year his junior) who lived in London for 34 years of her reign — Strasdin would perhaps have been interested to note that he foresaw this problem just seven years after Victoria’s accession. Developing his idea of “alienated” labor, Marx stated in 1844: “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him, but to the object.” As Strasdin might ponder, was Marx thinking about Victoria’s sumptuous coronation apparel or her Highland-core Scottish tweeds? Had he somehow crossed paths with George Doré or Miss Reid?
On this point, too, history falls silent, leaving us only to ponder, with Strasdin, how in the fullness of time, the makers of the royal wardrobe disappeared into the magnificence of what they made.
DRESSING THE QUEEN: Two Hundred Years of Craft, Couture, and Monarchy | By Kate Strasdin | Pegasus | 336 pp. | $29.95
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