The Chic Queen: A lifetime of effortless style by the at best serving monarch

Nobody's wardrobe works harder than the Queen's. Every outfit worn in public places is carefully calibrated to invigorate or remind, to signal gratitude or respect, to convey an awareness of power or familiarity. Her Majesty neither sets trends nor follows them – but while she is deaf to the siren call of fashion, she's her own single style. It's one she's perfected in recent years with the help of trusted couturier Stewart Parvin and her dressmaker Angela Kelly.

 Smart day dresses with a matching coat and a sharp smallbrimmed hat that will never cast her face into shadow have become her workaday staple. She is unrestrained in her colour pallette and tends towards block colours that produce her safer to see in a crowd or far away. She's going to often choose a colour with a coded message such as emerald green green for her historic trip to Ireland in europe in 2011. And even in her 80s she still demands ornate evening wear, heavily bejewelled or stitched, the better to display her expensive bunch of treasures.


The Regal 'wardrobe watch' began when she was just three and appeared on a journal cover wearing yellow and a single strand of pearls, starting a fashion for buttercup and primrose copycat outfits. As a beautiful young debutante in the 1940s, her gorgeous cheap long evening dresses were duplicated throughout the Commonwealth, as was her wedding dress. The exquisite Gary Hartnell dress she used for her Coronation was considered a couture masterpiece. At her insistence it incorporated an brand for every the main Uk and other Commonwealth countries from the Tudor Rose of The united kingdom to wheat, cotton and jute for Pakistan. From that moment it was clear her wardrobe would be tailored to Elizabeth the monarch rather than the woman, and while she would nod towards major trends she would draw her own stylistic arc. In the 1950s she looked delightful, her elegance compared to that of Elegance Kelly in designs by Hartnell and Robust Amies. In the 60s her hemline crept up – a nod towards the miniskirt; in the 1970s she used a maxi and by the 1980s she had used the decade's padding shoulder muscles and pussy cat bows.