Royal gowns through the years
When I was a kid, women dressed up like this quite a bit (minus the real jewels), and when I was a child I thought I’d have many such gowns when I grew up. But I’ve had perhaps three long gowns in my life, not including my wedding dress (which was rather simple), and all of them were worn by me prior to the age of twenty-one, mostly to attend other people’s formal weddings. After that, long gowns became passe, at least for us common folk.
But not for royalty. Here’s a photo album of quite a few worn by British royalty.
Several things strike me, looking at those gowns. The first is that the British royals – especially Princess Margaret – used to have quite a thing for the one-shouldered approach, something I favor as well. The second is that Queen Elizabeth and her sister really were lookers in their day. Here’s Margaret, for example:
The third is that I’ve gotten used to the Queen’s dowdy clothing, including dowdy but classic gowns, and I was surprised to see her showing a bit more skin when she was younger and had a great figure.
The fourth (no surprise) is that Kate looks lovely in almost all her gowns, and it’s not just her model-like form – it’s her smile and her choice of elegant designs.
The fifth is how retro some of Diana’s gowns look, but of course they do; it’s been a long time.
And the sixth is that Princess Anne has intermittently unflattering taste in clothes. She much prefers jodphurs and being on a horse.
Princess Anne, the terresterial nudibranch of fashion.
Kate, like Melania, always seems poised, elegant.
om–
I’d rather look at Princess Anne than Meghan Markle.
I was fascinated by Whit Stillman’s first film, “Metropolitan,” in which a young man, Tom, attends a debutante ball and gets involved with a group of other young people, mostly from rich families. It seems to take place in the late 1960s, as cultural standards are loosening and events like deb balls are beginning to decline — a development the characters discuss.
Tom becomes part of the group because they need an extra boy as an escort to balance the girls. So he ends up buying a used tuxedo (he does not come from money) and they all sit around in tuxes and long gowns (or at least what I would call such dresses) and have engagingly stilted conversations.
Quite charming. Fish out of water / rom-com.
It was a world I had no clue about. I thought debutante balls might have gone extinct like wearing nice clothes during air travel, but the balls go on. Here’s one in LA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Madrinas_Ball
__________________________
And I say, “Aw, come on now.
You know about my debutante.”
And she says, “Your debutante just knows what you need.
But I know what you want.”
–Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kh6K_-a0c4
Meghan is in a class (less) all her own. What was Harry thinking?
That gown of Ann and just one nudibranch
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Am-KR5eAtf79pBU_4bSNxQHaFd%26pid%3DApi&f=1
IIRC in Metropolitan Tom’s parents have divorced and his father remarried. There’s a scene where he finds some of his stuff out on the curb for the garbage man, where his step mom has put it. Where his rich friends wear proper formal overcoats with their tuxes, he wears an ordinary raincoat.
tcrosse:
True. His father even moved to Santa Fe.
Amongst his childhood memorabilia is a toy derringer and the wonderful Chris Eigeman remarks, “A derringer. Do you remember the Derringer craze? These are the toys of our generation … and they’re just throwing [them] out.”
I remember the sixties derringer craze.
Whit Stillman is such a good writer/director. (Though his last film, “Damsels in Distress,” was a let-down.)
I don’t know where neo grew up or exactly where she lives now (rural New England maybe?), but if she lived in New York City (and had money and COVID was over), she could go to black tie dinner dances every week from October to April, and maybe a few here and there over the summer, if it suited her. Though I will say that the number seems to be slowly declining.
Yes it was, barcelona is my personal favorite i think its metropolitan is more mid to late 70s with disco in the set in the late 70s.
Kate exudes great elegance whereas princess anne?
Miguel cervantes:
“Barcelona” was the first Stillman film I saw and still my favorite. Though “Metropolitan” is close.
Jane Austen fans will appreciate Audrey’s spirited defense of Austen in “Metropolitan” in the face of Tom’s fashionable, but phony, attack when he hadn’t even read Austen.
Hmm…according to wiki Stillman managed to finish “Love and Friendship” (2016) based on an early Austen work, “Lady Susan.” Amazon Prime offers L&F free to members. (It has its privileges.) I’m there and soon.
Anyway, Whit Stillman is one of the few conservative film directors around. I daresay Stillman would have gotten backing to make more films than he did otherwise.
Any conservative film fan who hasn’t seen Stillman has a great treat in store.
That portrait of Princess Margaret — Cecil Beaton photograph?
Neo thinks Princess Anne’s gown is unflattering? Really, Anne needs no flattering, but I think those silks are very becoming to her, or she makes them so.
If I were at the same party I would so want to monopolize her time. Though I can’t imagine I’d be the only man there who felt that way.
Well i liked on suits maybe harry was a fan from there
Prince margarets dalliances were part of the subject of the bank job
The text of barcelona was the sudden liberation of the rigid orthodoxies of francos spain
Re: Princess Margaret — Cecil Beaton
Baceseras:
I’d guess you were dead-bang-on.
https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/portraiture-in-the-royal-collection/princess-margaret-1930-2002-and-cecil
And an outbreak of antiamericanism that turned violent in at least one instant to a lead character.
About Whit Stillman, coincidentally I’ve been re-watching his films this year. I saw them all when they came out. In Spring I revisited Love & Friendship; Barcelona in mid-June; and just over a week ago The Last Days of Disco. Disco has become my new favorite of his. That picture worked a slow burn on me, took me by surprise: thought I had it all along, and then suddenly I got it. And Chloe Sevigny is so good in it — the whole cast is wonderful, but Sevigny is just magic.
Beckinsale was properly venomous even before underworld i guess its his most accessible film metropolitan being too posh and barcelona too remote
And since the summer solstice I’ve seen a movie a day every day: old favorites and new releases, old half-forgotten ones and first-time-new-to-me oldies. Time to take some time off, a week or more of no movies at all. Gotta let the contents settle in the container.
Why is there a preview button? What is it for? Does something happen somewhere when I press it?
Disco has become my new favorite of his. That picture worked a slow burn on me, took me by surprise: thought I had it all along, and then suddenly I got it.
Baceseras:
Likewise. I didn’t like “Disco.” Then the next time I watched:
“Oh…!”
Baceseras:
“Preview” is just there for some reason, but it doesn’t work. Ignore it.
However, there is a way to edit your comments for 5 minutes after they’re published.
Baceseras:
In my opinion Anne had and still has a tendency to wear clothes that are too busy, fussy, and girly-girly for her – or the opposite, too stark and unforgiving and dowdy. She had (and I think still has) a very nice figure and yet even when young had a tendency to wear old-ladyish clothing.
@huxley – I’m going to explore that site, thanks. Already looking around I found this picture of young Margaret in 1942, wearing a hat of military inspiration but not military. https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/22/collection/2813936/princess-elizabeth-later-queen-elizabeth-ii-b-1926
There’s something hard-to-pin-down goofy, and I thought, Doesn’t she look like Eric Idle! And then I saw this next picture and thought, Oh did I say that out loud?
https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/25/collection/2315230/princess-elizabeth-later-queen-elizabeth-ii-b-1926
Baceseras:
Yer killin’ me!
I hadn’t seen those shots but I believe them.
Thank you Neo, I’ll ignore the button, hope it doesn’t get offended. There was already a War of the Buttons; this could be the sequel, Revenge of the Buttons.
And, Neo, about Princess Anne, I’ll try to keep what you said in mind, but — well, one can but try.
Very elegant ladies <3
Princess Anne has never gone out of her way to look glamorous, but this photo of her at 17 shows that she inherited her mother’s looks:
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/g29843767/young-princess-anne-pictures/
Neo might be interested in the gowns worn by Margrethe II of Denmark, who celebrated her golden jubilee as queen this year. She is the only queen regnant I can think of who is (roughly at least) in Elizabeth II’s age bracket. She seems to have aged rather better than her French husband (who died of dementia in 2018; like Prince Philip, though, Henri de Monpezat was quite the looker in his younger days; see photos of him at the link).
Margrethe’s gowns look (to me at any rate) less dowdy than Elizabeth II’s, but in fairness to Elizabeth, she carries the Hanoverian genes for putting on the pounds in old age (George IV was the fattest monarch in British history) whereas Margrethe had better genetic luck.
Anyway, here are the photos of Margrethe’s gowns– and mercifully, they’re all on one page:
https://www.voguescandinavia.com/articles/queen-margrethe-of-denmark-50-years-on-the-throne
Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely ladies in pretty gowns.
About 40 years ago I met a redhead at a party in south London by the name of Sarah. She had the more posh accent, but I remember thinking that here’s a girl more at home in jeans and a sweatshirt than an evening gown. If she and Andrew would move to the country and just raise horses they’d be much happier than they are in London.
I don’t think that gown on the younger Princess Anne is unflattering. Consider, from approximately the same era, Diana’s wedding gown, which was awful.
Makes her look like a Portuguese Man ‘o War…but she was always her own woman…
Barry Meislin– IIRC, Prince Philip often said that Anne took after him in terms of personality much more than Charles did. She certainly looks more like her father than her mother, NTTAWWT. As for dress, Anne is the only woman in the royal family other than the Queen who regularly wears a military uniform– I don’t have a problem with that either, as it’s better than most of Camilla’s outfits.
Yes it was, barcelona is my personal favorite i think its metropolitan is more mid to late 70s with disco in the set in the late 70s.
The Last Days of Disco is set in 1980/81 and this is explicit in the introductory chyron. Stillman was born in 1952, so the raw material for Metropolitan would have been drawn from what he observed ca. 1971 among people he knew (though I can recognize features of my own late adolescent circle in the characters and I’m not a contemporary of Stillman’s). The principal female character in Metropolitan is made reference to in Disco as being a prominent figure in the publishing business in New York and being the youngest person ever to be promoted to a particular sort of . editorial position, so one can posit ten years separating the events in each. Barcelona, IIRC, includes Spain’s entry into NATO as part of the background, so would be set in 1984 or thereabouts.
One curio about Stillman’s films is that he repeatedly casts people from a pool who act in Stillman films but take few other parts and make their actual living doing other things. Carolyn Farina has appeared in most of his films, and was the lead actress in the first. She’s a clinical psychologist in New York.
One reason to go to a ball is to allow the wife to dress up as much as she likes, while still able to move and dance.
For those who love the dancing, it’s a definite limit on the gowns – but more lovely Slovak women dress up during the ball season and it’s great.
“Meghan is in a class (less) all her own. What was Harry thinking? om
She is indeed. As for Harry, whether true or not, I suspect he believes himself to be an “illegitimate” offspring and in some warped fashion, he blames the royal family for his mother’s unhappiness and eventual death. I suspect he wants to destroy the institution itself.
All of that led to his choice of Markle.