Wedding cake tasting

Chocolate cake with a white chocolate icing: delicious...

The garden opening at Tillypronie

The skies were mostly blue over Aberdeenshire, praise be, and the scent of azaleas was sweet in the clear air. Despite the dawn forays of rabbits and deer, the borders were blooming, and all seemed well with the world (although the single duckling on the pond caused some concern; hopefully, its mother was just out of sight, ready to return after everyone else had gone home). There were homemade scones and strawberry meringues in the tea tent, and a television on the side so that we could watch the river pageant in London, and admire the fortitude of all those who stood or sailed in the rain. It's a long way from the Thames, up here in the Highlands, yet is it too whimsical to believe there were unseen threads that somehow connected us? A sense of how the past and the present merge together, perhaps, with a gentle hope of what is still to come...

The Tarland Jubilee celebrations

Yesterday afternoon at the Tarland jubilee celebrations, there was a most impressive cake, complete with an iced crown on top, along with the best Scottish drop scones, flapjacks and shortbread. The children had made bunting and their fancy dress outfits were wondrous to behold (just look at the delightful three queens above). As for the music: well, it's almost impossible not to well up with emotion when you hear the fiddle played so beautifully by Paul Anderson, who was born and brought up in Tarland. Let me know if the link works, so that you can listen to him, too...

The Diamond Jubilee and other jubilations

Here's a piece I wrote for today's Times about the Queen's clothes (see below, with one of Cecil Beaton's wonderful pictures of the Coronation, and, above, his contact sheet from a photographic shoot of the Royal family in 1942). I'm up in Scotland for a few days, where the sun is shining, and the Tarland Jubilee celebrations in full swing (of which more later). The gardens at Tillypronie are open tomorrow afternoon, and the rhododendrons and azaleas are in perfect bloom. There will be tea and cakes and much else besides... pictures to follow, although I always hope that I meet some blog friends in the garden...

If what we wear is an indication of who we are, then the Queen’s formal wardrobe is the ultimate emblem of Royalty: her identity as monarch made material in the splendour of her robes. And yet her reign began in a simple black dress, grieving for the death of her father, George VI, in February 1952. Her mourning clothes were already part of her travelling wardrobe, a sartorial precaution, given the King’s ill health (she was in Kenya when he died, and flew back to London, stepping off the plane in a black coat and hat). After being met at the airport by the then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth returned to Clarence House, where her 84-year-old grandmother Queen Mary curtseyed and kissed her hand, while also issuing a reminder of what was to be a lifetime of royal dress codes: ‘Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.’

Nine days after her accession to the throne, Elizabeth II attended her father’s funeral in a long black veil, face shrouded like those of her mother and grandmother, hemlines well below the knee. It was not until the following year, 1953, that her Coronation took place; so this summer’s colourful Jubilee celebration has as its counterpoint a darker anniversary of bereavement. George VI was 56 when he died, his daughter only 25 when, in her mother’s words, she faced ‘the great and lonely station to which she has been called’. As the Queen’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith observes, ‘Particularly at the outset, Elizabeth II’s focus was on showing gravitas as monarch… The freedom she enjoyed as a young princess – she once attended a ball at the American ambassador’s residence dressed as an Edwardian parlour maid, with Philip costumed as a waiter – had to be subdued, at least in public.’

Yet she had already proved herself more than able to balance the demands of propriety with a more private informality; never more so, perhaps, than as a young bride in November 1947, wearing a gown designed by Norman Hartnell. Elizabeth’s wedding dress was embroidered with 10,000 pearls, and in the aftermath of the Second World War the tiniest of details was significant, as Hartnell noted in his memoir, ‘on grounds of patriotism’, right down to the origins of the silk worms. Hartnell used Scottish satin, but not before ascertaining ‘the true nationality of the worms’, Italian or Japanese larvae having been deemed unsuitable. As it turned out, the worms were from China, which allowed Hartnell to proceed ‘with a much easier conscience.’ Noel Coward, who attended the pre-wedding ball at Buckingham Palace, as well as the ceremony itself at Westminster Abbey, recorded the events in his diary: ‘The most lovely sight I have ever seen. Everyone looking shiny and happy; something indestructible... English tradition at its best.’

But after the glorious pageantry came an entirely different kind of honeymoon outfit: in the seclusion of the Balmoral estate, where Elizabeth went deer stalking with her husband, dressed in army boots and a leather wool-lined jacket. Here, the fairytale princess felt ‘like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,’ as she described it in a letter to her cousin Margaret Rhodes. Her countrywoman wardrobe has remained consistent over the ensuing six decades; somewhat less ferocious than her honeymoon vignette, but completely traditional, with well-polished stout shoes, sturdy tweeds, practical mackintosh, Royal Stewart kilts, cardigans and silk print headscarves knotted under her chin. These latter provide a clue to her determined character; an expert horsewoman, the Queen refuses to wear a hard riding hat, prompting her staff to observe that ‘the only thing that comes between the Queen and her heir is an Hermes scarf’ (although in her view, this is indicative more of practicality than a dare-devil streak; she prefers not to squash her trademark hair-do).

The pendulum swing between public display and privacy, even mystery, has been maintained throughout her reign, perhaps nowhere more clearly reflected than in her wardrobe. This was evident even on the spectacular day of her Coronation on June 2^nd 1953, all of it televised except for the most sacred moments of her anointing by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hartnell was again commissioned to make the gown, based along the same lines as her wedding dress, but embroidered with the symbols of the United Kingdom and the Commonweath. At first, the couturier was dismayed to discover that these emblems must include a Welsh leek, rather than a daffodil, following the instructions of the Garter King of Arms. ‘The leek I agreed was a most admirable vegetable, full of historic significance and doubtless of health-giving properties, but scarcely noted for its beauty.’ In the end, however, ‘the despised Leek proved a real inspiration’, while Hartnell also added a little hidden embroidery, without telling the Queen: a ‘four-leaved shamrock for luck’. At Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth’s maids of honour arranged the monarch’s crimson velvet Robe of State trimmed with ermine, and then carried the 18-foot train as she walked along the aisle. After the Queen had sworn her coronation oath, her diadem and robes were removed, and replaced with a simple dress of white linen, ready for her anointing away from public view; in Hartnell’s words, ‘bereft of all the world’s vainglory’. Then she was enveloped with the heavy coronation robes and decorated with the regalia of royalty: jewelled sceptres, a ruby and sapphire ring to symbolise her fidelity to her subjects, and St Edward’s Crown of solid gold. As Sally Bedell Smith observes, each of the Queen’s garments, ‘from the simple linen dress to the splendid vestments… were designed to signify her priest-like status.’

This was dressing at its most heightened – the theatre of monarchy on the grandest scale -- yet also with a quiet emotional resonance, as noted by the royal photographer Cecil Beaton, who perceived on the Queen Mother’s face a look of ‘sadness combined with pride’. But professionalism prevailed; for as Beaton wrote the following year, ‘Royalty must dress for the crowds. Of first consideration is the fact that they are to be seen. For this reason off-the-face hats are worn; while, if possible, height is added so that those at the back of a crowd can catch even a glimpse of a felt halo or an aigrette and not be disappointed.’

Ever since then, these broad rules have continued to apply. Sir Hardy Amies, who started designing for the Queen in 1950, described his task as providing ‘clothes that help her in what I can only describe as her work. The Queen once spoke of this to me as “going about my business”.’ Thus he had to consider her comfort, as well as the all-important visual effect of what she wore – using fabrics that were sufficiently light for overseas tours in hot climates, yet heavy enough not to blow around in high winds; and with neat tailoring that would keep her from any embarrassment when clambering out of carriages, boats or cars. In general, Amies remarked, ‘the Queen can wear any colour provided it is a colour’, and sufficiently bright ‘so as to stand out in a crowd.’ Like Beaton, he also recognized ‘that a wide-brimmed hat would be undesirable for royalty. Hands must not be used to hold hats in a wind: they are for waving or holding bouquets.’

Sir Norman Hartnell died in 1979, Amies in 2003, but the woman they dressed is still going strong, with an imaginative new team coordinating her wardrobe. Central is the Queen’s senior dresser and personal assistant, Angela Kelly, who organizes her wardrobe with meticulous precision, so that the details of each outfit are entered onto a computer spread-sheet, along with the date and circumstances in which it was worn. While the Queen is not averse to wearing the same clothes more than once – she is known, after all, for her thrift – she is careful to avoid doing so at the same place, lest she disappoints anyone who has seen her before. She is also mindful that many of those who she meets, however briefly, will be seeing her perhaps for the only time in their lives; her clothes and jewels must therefore make an impression.

It was Kelly who introduced Stewart Parvin as a royal dressmaker in 2001, although she designs many of the Queen’s clothes herself, including the striking primrose yellow outfit for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding last year. But Parvin can claim credit for the powerfully symbolic green dress and coat that the Queen wore on her arrival in Ireland a fortnight later (the first time a British monarch had visited since 1911). And despite his predecessor’s injunction that she should be seen in strong colours, Parvin proved that rules are made to be broken with his pale ivory silk crepe gown that the Queen chose for the state dinner at Buckingham Palace the following week, to welcome President and Mrs Obama. (On second thoughts, perhaps he was simply honouring an older tradition: of white as a ceremonial court dress, all the better for displaying a glittering diamond necklace and tiara.)

At the age of 86, the Queen is the embodiment of a great many good qualities – constancy, courage, stoicism – but she also manifests something increasingly rare in a world that tends to celebrate the triumph of youth over experience. She has aged with dignity, and without vanity or apology. According to Stewart Parvin, ‘She has reached a stage in her life when she has complete confidence in who she is… the Queen looks squarely in the mirror and she likes what she sees.’ Given her own observation that she must be ‘seen to be believed’, this makes Elizabeth II remarkably believable. In an era where steadfastness seems lacking in our smooth-faced, sharp-suited politicians, and trust is at a premium, the Queen represents a truer combination of style and substance. More so than any other public figure, she has worn well…

Chanel and film at the V&A

I'll be talking at the V&A tomorrow afternoon, as part of a series of events on fashion and cinema. There will also be the very rare opportunity of seeing 'Tonight or Never', featuring Chanel's costumes for Gloria Swanson, on Sunday afternoon. More details here... and a taste of the Hollywood glories below...

In conversation with Hannah Rothschild...

If anyone is going to be at the Du Maurier festival in Fowey tomorrow, then I do recommend the event with Hannah Rothschild, discussing her new book, The Baroness, an enthralling tale of her great aunt Pannonica, (otherwise known as Nica) who ran away to New York in the 1950s, having fallen in love with the jazz of Thelonius Monk. The narrative swoops from European Jewish ghettos to English mansions and French chateaus; from the Roaring Twenties to the Second World War; from edgy low life to haute bohemia. It's a musical odyssey, but also a search for hidden family truths: and, as Hannah says, whether 'we can ever really escape from where we come from?'
For those of you who are in London on Monday, I'll be talking to Hannah at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street (7pm on May 14th). Meanwhile, here's an interview with her and an extract from The Baroness.

She walks in beauty, like the night...

Hardy Amies ball gown (from the V&A collection)

Hardy Amies and models

Norman Hartnell dress for the actress Lilli Palmer to wear to a Coronation Ball in 1953 (from the V&A collection).

Coronation gown by Norman Hartnell

The idea of a ball gown might seem anachronistic – gone are the days where a debutante spent a season whirling around in voluminous dresses, hoping to be swept off her feet (and thereafter down the aisle) by an eligible young man. But a new V&A exhibition (Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950) suggests that the showstopping dress remains as potent a symbol of escapism as always. For here is the glittering material evidence of the continuing power of the Cinderella fairytale, wherein a girl’s life is transformed by the wand of a fairy godmother who declares ‘you shall go to the ball’. Alternatively, in the words of the V&A fashion curator Oriel Cullen, ‘ball gowns are so celebratory, created for a grand occasion, and encapsulating a special moment, that it seems appropriate to stage the exhibition now, in the year of the Olympics and the Jubilee’.

The pieces on show at the V&A span six decades: from Norman Hartnell’s royal gowns in 1950s, to Catherine Walker’s 1989 ‘Elvis’ design for Diana, Princess of Wales (so-called because of the high-standing white ruff collar, embroidered, like the rest of the silk outfit, with thousands of pearls), to more recent dresses by Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Gareth Pugh. As such, the ballgowns mark a shift from the traditional splendour of the Coronation in 1953 to the celebrity exhibitionism of the red carpet; and also, as observed by Sonnet Stanfill (co-curator of the V&A exhibition), ‘from the private event to the public parade’. Not that the debutantes of the 1950s were kept from outside view: the social season included Royal Ascot and regattas at Henley and Cowes. They were photographed at Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball, all of them wearing long white dresses, as if in training for their future weddings, and arriving at Buckingham Palace to be presented to the Queen (a tradition described by Prince Philip as ‘bloody daft’, which finally ended in 1958).

Above all, the pageantry of the Coronation, with its attendant parties and receptions, was an opportunity for British ballgowns to be displayed at their most splendid, in a manner that went beyond the surface frivolities of fashion. Oriole Cullen notes that in the run-up to the Coronation, the Queen’s couturier Norman Hartnell had an atelier employing 350 people, not only producing ball gowns for society women, but also formal robes for all the female members of the Royal Family. ‘This parade of monarchy… which heralded the future reign of Queen Elizabeth II, was a welcome celebration for many after the years of austerity that followed the Second World War, and this most spectacular of ceremonies signalled a hoped-for return to a period of prosperity.’

Of the gowns on show at the V&A, one in particular demonstrates a touch of the gaiety and glamour that lightened the pomp of a royal occasion: designed by Hartnell for the actress Lilli Palmer to wear to a Coronation ball, it is of cream duchesse satin embellished with pink beaded petals and leaves, including a pair of saucily flamboyant flowers over each breast. And despite the widespread characterization of the early Fifties as an era of deferential convention in British society, the young debutantes who were presented at court were not immune to subversive tendencies: in 1952, firecrackers were discovered inside the traditional party cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, ready to explode when it was cut. As for sex, the ‘debs’ delights’ on offer were variously catalogued as MSC (‘Makes Skin Creep’) or NSIT (‘Not Safe In Taxis’); Patrick Lichfield, then a young Sandhurst officer who accompanied his sister as a debutante in 1958, confessed in his memoir to having fallen into the latter category, but remembered the season with some affection. ‘Those deb dances were, for a while at least, sheer magic; acre upon acre of pink chiffon and starched cotton effortlessly ebbing and flowing… the whole in constant motion all the while until I began to feel myself in serious danger of becoming socially seasick.’

Sartorial rebellion was inevitable, away from decorous ballgowns and toward the iconoclasm represented by Mary Quant, who opened her first King’s Road boutique in 1955. Two years previously, Quant had met her future husband and business partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, at Goldsmiths Art School; by then, although she admired Englishwomen’s tweeds, she was already dubious about the merits of their evening dresses. ‘Quite grand young women had to have their frocks made by aged retainers retired off in the upstairs attics of Victorian-style households,’ she writes in her recent autobiography. ‘Young women would point out the charms of some delicious dress in French Vogue and Mabel the ex-nanny would have a bash at making it, with some heavy fabric bought, reduced, in Jacqmar’s sale. The poor girls then had to compete with a chic debutante over from Paris…’

Quant, of course, became famous for her controversial mini-skirts; but the move to off-the-peg fashion was also apparent in couturiers like John Cavanagh, who introduced a boutique line of evening gowns for younger customers. Cavanagh had worked with Pierre Balmain in Paris for three years, from 1947, before opening his own premises in Mayfair in 1952, and his rigorous training in French couture refined his ready-to-wear designs. The V&A exhibition includes Cavanagh’s chic black petal dress, impeccably tailored but with a youthful insouciance, alongside a more startling mustard yellow evening gown worn by the young Princess Anne from the boutique range at Bellville Sassoon (the latter a design house established in 1953 by a former debutante, Belinda Bellville).

Not that the ballgown is the sole preserve of the ingenue, as is apparent in the designs of the redoubtable Hardy Amies, who opened his Savile Row couture house after distinguishing himself as a British Intelligence officer during the Second World War,  and received a royal warrant as the Queen’s dressmaker in 1955. The V&A collection contains two elegantly grownup gowns by Amies, one in subtle grey silk with a contrasting pink sash, and another in bold crimson satin, chosen by a Mrs Lister Bolton, that would look as confident now if worn by Cate Blanchett on a red carpet as it did in 1950.

But given their fairytale associations, it seems fitting that some of the most memorable ballgowns exist untrammeled in the imagination, rather than within the sealed vitrines of the V&A. As an undergraduate in the early Eighties, I would buy second-hand ballgowns (no one called them vintage in those days) from a stall in Cambridge market, for less than a couple of pounds apiece. The dresses were older than I was, yet perfect for all manner of youthful pleasures (my favourite, in lemon yellow chiffon, took me from picnics to garden parties to a Roxy Music concert). Sadly, none of them survived unscathed (torn on my bicycle, stained with grass or smudged with ink); unlike the gown most cherished in my memory, worn by Nancy Mitford’s heroine in ‘The Pursuit of Love’: ‘Linda had one particularly ravishing ball-dress made of masses of pale grey tulle down to her feet… and made a sensation whenever she appeared in her yards of tulle, very much disapproved of by Uncle Matthew, on the grounds that he had known three women burnt to death in tulle ball-dresses.’

John Cavanagh evening gown (V&A collection)

Mitford wrote lovingly of Linda in 1945, looking back to a golden summer season before the grim shadows of the Second World War. In the reality of the harsh winter that followed, when rationing was still severe, Mitford ventured out to her first big party since the beginning of the war in an improvised dress, made by sewing an old nightie onto a cast-off satin ball-gown. ‘I think at balls it is better to look a joke than dreary don’t you,’ she remarked to her sister Diana. Subsequent pictures of Mitford reveal her to look neither dreary nor a joke; she used the money she made from The Pursuit of Love to move to Paris and buy herself Dior couture.

Nowadays, the ball-gown appears to be having something of a revival, and not only for Hollywood celebrities twirling on the awards circuit. Shanghai’s first debutante ball was staged in January this year, with ten British debs flown in for the occasion, to mingle with some of the richest people in China. In the new world of global capitalism, it seems that the ballgown still has a place in a fairytale with a twist; white satin and diamond tiaras, beneath the red flag of Communism flying high over the People’s Republic of China.