Queen’s 100th birthday fashion exhibition unfolds, Andrew questions linger

There’s a moment of rebellion in Queen Elizabeth’s childhood that though supremely out of character, offers a telling insight into the inner steeliness of the future monarch. 

It was recorded by palace governess Marion Crawford — ‘Crawfie’ — and is described by author Justine Picardie in her intriguing new book Fashioning the Crown.

Elizabeth didn’t go to school. Rather, she and sister Margaret Rose were educated at home and the incident occurred during a rather tedious French lesson.

With no warning, the young Princess Elizabeth grasps hold of the “ornamental silver ink pot” on her desk and places it upside down on her head, the ink dripping through her “golden curls” and down onto her face.

“It’s so extraordinary” Picardie told the ABC. “This little girl who is otherwise so orderly, so meticulous; her governess says that sometimes she gets out of bed to check that her shoes are lined up just so.”

Crawfie doesn’t give a date, but it appears to have happened before the abdication of Elizabeth’s uncle King Edward VIII, an historic act which changed her life irrevocably. Picardie suggests the audacious tanty, reveals both a brief glimpse of the maddening strictures of the princess’s gilded-cage childhood and what Elizabeth was capable of — that even she had her limits.

That inkpot upturning is important because such an outward act of defiance was never seen again. But there are more refined shades of it in some of the pivotal moments in Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, times when the sovereign’s frustration showed itself, albeit with a coating of regal diplomacy. “Recollections may vary,” the palace noted following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s claims of mistreatment. The Queen’s “annus horribilis” referenced in 1992, in the iconic address commemorating the 40^th anniversary of her succession is now considered a signpost in her reign. 

How would the Queen respond?

In the chilling light of the current Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor scandal, one wonders how the Queen might respond today. 

Had she lived to see her 100th birthday, a milestone to be marked with the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of the late Queen’s fashion ever mounted, Her Majesty would have been confronted with what is surely the most damaging incident for the House of Windsor since the 1936 abdication that set then 10-year-old Elizabeth on her path to lifelong service.

The release of countless documents implying the depth her second son’s connection with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein resulted in the stripping of Andrew’s remaining title of Prince and his eviction from his Crown Estate Windsor home Royal Lodge, both swiftly enacted by his elder brother King Chrles III. Then came the ultimate ignominy of Andrew’s arrest on February 19 by British police on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The investigation is ongoing.

The former prince has always denied any wrongdoing but in the court of public opinion Andrew has already been tried. “The Queen would have been appalled,” says Picardie.

Titles matter in royal life, but names do too. 

The Mountbatten-Windsor name which Andrew has now been demoted to, was actually adopted when Andrew was born. It was then seen as a gentle atonement to the Duke of Edinburgh who had originally wanted his children to carry his surname Mountbatten, not Windsor, but Philip was overruled by his wife.

Windsor, a name plucked from a list of thoroughly English names, was chosen by King George V in 1917 to replace his Saxe-Coburg-Gotha surname, its Germanic roots increasingly troublesome as German bombs rained on London in World War I. Mountbatten too was confected, an anglicised version of Battenberg, changed for the same reason. Optics are everything.

So, for Mountbatten-Windsor to now fall into disrepute thanks to Andrew’s disgrace feels deeply ironic. Time will tell if that name too will now be airbrushed out of the royal history books.

Former Navy helicopter pilot war hero Andrew is described by many commentators as the Queen’s favourite child.

Picardie offers insights that challenge that story.

Her husband Philip Astor was Prince Philip’s godson and the same age as Andrew. Astor’s parents had a social relationship with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh when Astor was growing up and he was invited to dancing classes at Buckingham Palace with a young Andrew. 

“My husband saw that childhood unfold, and he said it was not the case that Andrew was her favourite,” says Picardie.

How much did she know?

As thoughts turn to Queen Elizabeth’s legacy many are questioning exactly how much the sovereign knew about her son’s behaviour. 

“She would have known very little about it,” says royal biographer and journalist Christopher Wilson who believes that in the rigid hierarchical structure of the royal household, even if staff privately questioned Andrew’s behaviour they would have felt it inappropriate to speak disparagingly about him to his mother. 

“She was, within palace walls, almost a godlike figure, and nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news,” he says. “In front of his mother Andrew would have behaved in the manner expected of him, and what he did away from her would be his business.” 

Wilson believes it really wasn’t a case of Her Majesty turning a blind eye to her son’s louche life and inappropriate connections, rather that she had the huge burden of state to deal with. 

“The job came first — the behaviour of all her children, not just Andrew, would be of secondary interest once they reached school age,” he says. 

But it’s also worth noting that family was sacrosanct to Her Majesty and she took newspaper reports with a pinch of salt, Wilson adds.

Of course the Queen must eventually have realised the alleged gravity of Andrew’s actions for it was no doubt under her guidance that then Prince Andrew stepped back from public duties in November 2019 following his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview and in early 2022 following the legal approval by a US judge for Virginia Giuffre’s sexual assault civil lawsuit to proceed, Her Majesty officially removed most of Andrew’s patronages and military affiliations.

“When the roof fell in over Epstein, decisions will have been made for Her Majesty at a very high level — cabinet secretary to her private secretary and back again — as to how much information to give her. It will have been severely filtered,” he says. “So, I don’t think she was complicit in any way. By this time let’s not forget she was a very old lady and nobody wanted to cause her distress.”

Nevertheless, the Queen reportedly contributed millions to Andrew’s out of court settlement with the late Virginia Giuffre in early 2022, to end the civil lawsuit accusing her son of sexual abuse. The terms of the deal stated that Andrew was not admitting any wrongdoing. 

The payment was likely a desperate move by the Queen to protect the reputation of the monarchy, which on balance with hindsight may have backfired. Certainly as more information comes out about Andrew’s action commentators are becoming  increasingly more skeptical about exactly what his mother knew when.

The gulf between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s entitled arrogance and his mother’s deep devotion to public service couldn’t be starker. That dedication stems from her childhood, says Picardie. 

Following the abdication, young Elizabeth received one-on-one intensive education in the British constitution and all aspects of history and politics. “I think those existential threats that came straight after the abdication of her uncle, that also coincided with the rise of fascism in this country as well as in Europe, shaped her,” he says. “She knew, in every fibre of her being that the Crown can never be taken for granted.”

Picardie describes a pivotal moment during the World War II when former royal librarian Sir Owen Morshead took the princess on a tour of Windsor Castle. There Elizabeth was shown the blood-stained linen shirt said to have been worn by King Charles I at his beheading, a gruesome item that is still held in the royal archives. 

“In that faded shift is the fabric of history — that a king, a monarch can lose his head and his kingdom,” notes Picardie. “That understanding of jeopardy, of crisis made her very well aware that you never know where the next crisis is coming from, and that is a very good lesson for future monarchs to learn from.”

A life in fashion

After her death in September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II’s clothes were given to the Royal Collection Trust archives to catalogue. Unlike the Stuart monarch’s bloodied shirt these items tell a much happier tale.

Curator and Surveyor of the King’s Works of Art Caroline de Guitaut first started receiving the items about six months after Her Majesty died and was blown away. She quickly realised this collection was truly exceptional and two years ago put forward a proposal for a combined exhibition, book and digital project which she believed would be “a great way to mark the centenary of Her Majesty’s birth. I felt that the archive was very justified in needing to be shown, because it’s so important, it needs to be shared and with audiences,” says de Guitaut whose bold idea was swiftly approved.

The resulting exhibition, opening this month in Buckingham Palace, not only traces the story of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch through clothing worn in all ten decades of her life, both on- and off-duty, it presents a vital history of the British fashion industry.

Some 200 items include clothing, jewellery, hats, shoes and accessories alongside never-before-seen design sketches, fabric samples and handwritten correspondence including some from Her Majesty that reveal the behind-the-scenes process of dressing the Queen.

De Guitaut doesn’t know if the Queen was aware that her wardrobe and records would be archived and ultimately exhibited.

 “It was a decision made by His Majesty the King,” she says with a smile. The Royal Collection was given everything the late Queen kept including baby clothes and all the records and accompanying correspondence and paperwork. The curator confesses she has spent the past few years in thrilling uncharted territory.

“It’s incredibly rare in fashion history to have the original sketch, the swatch of fabric, or the embroidery sample, the finished piece, and then correspondence from the main protagonists about it,” she says. “For me it was really important to be able to join those dots together and use what the archive tells me about the Queen’s relationship with fashion.”

De Guitaut’s favourite discovery was a pair of gold lamé dresses that turned out not to be British at all. 

“They were designed for her and her sister Princess Margaret by Jeanne Lanvin, the wonderful female couturier in Paris and they are just perfection. Lanvin rarely made children’s clothes, so they were likely one-offs commissioned by their mother Queen Elizabeth who was an important client,” she says.

 “What’s so touching is that you can tell that an extra piece of gold lamé fabric has been added around the hem and to me that says that Princess Elizabeth obviously loved wearing it, and she wanted to carry on wearing it, so she needed it lengthening, and someone — probably not Lanvin — had gone to so much trouble altering it. I think they’re from 1938, so Princess Elizabeth would have been 12.”

Justine Picardie was granted access to the archives of the Queen’s wardrobe when she was writing Fashioning the Crown. The clothes were still being catalogued at the time and aside from Her Majesty’s Norman Hartnell wedding dress and coronation robe, it is her ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) military uniform from the Second World war she found most “significant and important”.

“Princess Elizabeth wanted to join up at the age of 16, and wasn’t allowed to, but she did join at 18, and in joining the ATS, she joined what was known as the Cinderella of the women’s military services,” explains Picardie. 

“The work they did was incredibly vital, but it was quite a drab khaki uniform compared to the chic Wrens uniform for the women’s naval services that was designed by Edward Molyneux. She loved it,” she says. “It’s what she wore when she literally served her people as a service woman and rolled up her sleeves, got her hands dirty, learned how to strip down an engine, drive an army truck, drive an ambulance, change a wheel, but it’s also the uniform that she’s wearing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day.”

“This was the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and she’s standing beside her father, her mother and her sister, and her father is in uniform, her mother is wearing a Norman Hartnell ensemble, as she has been throughout the war and her younger sister Margaret is also in a more feminine outfit. 

But Elizabeth is wearing her military uniform, like the King, which signifies her role as the heir to the throne. The balcony at Buckingham Palace was conceived and designed by Prince Albert in the 19th century as a place for the royal family to appear to their people as if on a stage. And it’s worked that way ever since,” says Picardie.

It was also that uniform that allowed young Elizabeth her legendary one night of freedom. 

“In fact, her diary shows it was several nights,” corrects Picardie. “It was when she went out with her sister and some friends from the royal household and her khaki ATS uniform gives her these rare evenings when she can mingle with hundreds of thousands of other people. It allowed her to be ordinary amongst her people. I think that’s incredibly significant.”

Stewart Parvin, whose clothes are also in the exhibition, started designing for the Queen in the late 1990s and continued working for Her Majesty until her death. It was a unique relationship that began when the Queen’s dresser Angela Kelly wandered into his shop in London’s Belgravia.

“She said she was looking for clothes for an important client who was in the public eye,” says Parvin, who had no idea that the woman she was talking about was the Head of State. 

That was the start of a wonderful fashion relationship which involved Parvin dressing the Queen for three decades. The designer confesses to being nervous when he first went to Buckingham Palace with the calico mock ups of the designs she had chosen. He was one of very few people allowed into the inner sanctum of her private dressing room but says he found her “utterly charming and easy”.

Reflecting on legacy

Many believe the Queen wasn’t interested in fashion, that this was the territory of her younger sister and her impeccably dressed mother. 

Actually, says Parvin, she deeply admired beautiful fabric and design and clearly understood the power of clothes. 

“The Queen was never perceived to be fashionable. However, when you look back which you can do with this exhibition, you see she was very much more on point than people ever realised,” Parvin says. “There was a very strong sense of style and a very strong sense of fashion within her role as the monarch of the nation and head of the Commonwealth. When you see those really beautiful clothes, that’s when you truly get a sense of her.”

Parvin last saw the Queen when he was fitting one of her final outfits. She wore it on the balcony for the Platinum Jubilee — green with a matching hat with a big black pom pom on the front.

“She was so fabulous that day. I couldn’t possibly have believed that that was the last time. There was none of that. I genuinely thought I’d be back there. That was the spring of the year she died.”

Parvin like many who admired Her Majesty feels this centenary will remind people of the power of her legacy. 

“There’s never going to be anyone like her ever again in anyone’s life,” he says. “The circumstances are never going to be the same. To have someone who becomes the monarch at such a young age, and to live so long and not abdicate, just to carry on doing one’s duty… that’s never, ever going to happen again.”