British Queen Elizabeth II's century of fashion

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1:11If you're in the Abbey, a huge building, and the Queen's there, and she was quite a small lady, she was very young, and then you have this massive train following behind her, it would be very hard to miss. There's a very famous picture of the Queen with Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn Monroe is wearing a wonderful black evening dress. Your eye doesn't go to Marilyn Monroe, it goes first to the Queen, who has got the tiniest waist and is so glamorous, and you think, oh, how amazing she looked. Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Daniela Ralph, the BBC's Senior Royal Correspondent, and I want to talk about the member of the royal family who was probably the most recognisable woman in the world, the late Queen Elizabeth II.

2:00She would have been 100 years old this month, and it's her clothes which will be our guide to her life. The main thing that has surprised me is just how she kept this close-knit circle of designers. Caroline de Guito is in charge of the Royal Archive, from fine art to priceless tiaras. She's also the curator of a new exhibition in London, Queen Elizabeth II, Her Life in Style. I asked her how she chose the pieces to go on display. That was quite a challenge. There are over 4 ,500 pieces in the archive. It's very, very large, representing a long life. But the selection really was made on a few principles.

2:45The idea that I wanted to include all the key designers and couturiers who had worked for Queen Elizabeth II, to represent the different aspects of her dressing, be that on the global stage, for overseas tours, tailoring, which of course is the foundation of British couture, or the glamour of evening wear. And the accessories matter too? They really do, particularly millinery, I think. We picture the Queen wearing a hat when we think of her. I think it was Stephen Jones who said she was the patron saint of hats. What does this exhibition tell us about her interest in fashion and what her style was?

3:20Did she have a style? I think she definitely had a style, something very elegant, something with restraint. And what this exhibition shows for the first time, because we have everything in the archive, including sketches, correspondence, is just how engaged she was in the production of her wardrobe, something that even surprised me, but also the craftsmanship that underpins all of the work of those great couturiers that she engaged. Can we talk about the more glamorous end of the outfits? A lot of them are behind you here, the ball gowns, the state banquet dress. I mean, it's a reminder of there was real glitz in this wardrobe, wasn't there?

3:55There was. And I think this is where all her designers really came to the fore, but particularly Norman Hartnell in the production of her evening, where he really understood how these rich materials, these heavy encrustations of embroidery, would make the Queen sparkle and stand out and be even more visible. You're struck, as I've walked around the exhibition, just how many Norman Hartnell dresses are in here. Who was he and why was he someone that she favoured so much? Well, Hartnell established his salon in 1923. He was only 22 years old. He had this great sense of theatre, of drama, and he understood materials and how they could work to the best advantage.

4:34He dressed royalty, of course, but he dressed film stars, actresses, even theatrical productions. And I think it was that sense of drama, but also the fact that he had worked with other members of the royal family before, in effect, he was passed on to Princess Elizabeth. And he created the first dress for her in 1935, so, you know, she was nine years old. And that relationship lasted for another 40 years. That's borne out by the correspondence. We have letters from Hartnell, from Hardy Amies, where they really express their deep understanding of what it was that the Queen needed to achieve with her wardrobe.

5:11What do we learn about what she liked in this exhibition? What were the things in her clothes that she wanted? I think she wanted comfort. I think she wanted elegance. She couldn't worry about whether her hat would fly away or whether the texture of the fabric would crease as she emerged from a car or a plane or any of the things she had to do on a day-to-day basis. But on the other hand, she clearly really enjoyed clothes, working with the designers, suggesting things herself, because like any woman, you know, she wanted to look her best. Can I ask you about the christening robe? the first sort of official outfit I suppose she will have worn.

5:47And that has stood the test of time. I know it's been remade now, but in terms of royal history, that's an important moment. The christening robe, yes, is probably one of the most historically important pieces in the exhibition alongside the wedding dress and, of course, the Queen's coronation dress. It was commissioned by Queen Victoria, made of honiton lace and spitalfield silk and, of course, worn by the Queen as a baby when she was just one month old. It's been used to christen around 60 royal babies over its 130-year or more history until it was retired and the Queen commissioned a replica to be made.

6:21And we think this is the first time that it's been publicly exhibited. A centrepiece of many women's wardrobe will be their wedding dress. It tells us a lot about her and the time that she got married, but also you can see the roots of her dressing really from that dress, I think. I think, yes, I think you're right. we do see something of the future in that dress. She's still a princess in 1947. Britain was in recovery after the Second World War. It was not a great time, but this did give a sense of hope and a new beginning. How safe a dresser was she, or are there daring moments in this exhibition that we should look out for?

6:58I think for the most part, she was relatively safe in her dressing. However, there are a few things that perhaps will take visitors by surprise. So I think some of the evening wear from the 1960s, where the silhouette completely changed from the large crinolines she wore in the 40s and 50s, into this incredibly slimline, very fitted dress type, often heavily embellished with embroidery, which is quite a surprise, I think. And then there are other moments where she chooses to wear items of clothing given on her tours. And there's one specific example from Yellowknife in Canada, where she was visiting in 1970.

7:35and she decided to wear this quite stylish but quite vivid jacket, like a leather jacket really, over the top of her 1970s, even in dress with her tiara, all her jewels and it just lends this sort of quite casual air to an otherwise incredibly formal outfit. Have you got a favourite piece you can talk us through? It's so difficult to think of a single piece. I suppose if I had to pick a favourite, it would be the first dress that visitors will see when they come into the exhibition. It was designed by Hartnell in 1953 for the Queen to wear on her first ever visit as Queen to New Zealand. It's made of lace, it's made of gold lame, it's sort of dress of dreams really.

8:15And that's why I chose it to be the first piece that visitors would encounter as they start their journey through the exhibition. As I walk through the exhibition, I'm struck by just how many outfits are made by the late Queen's go-to designers for so much of her life. Sir Norman Hartnell and Sir Hardy Amis. They were her trusted designers and helped establish her fashion formula. It was a sort of royal uniform, often a daydress, coat, matching hat, a string of pearls, earrings and a handbag, famously with no money in it. Probably the most popular thing that we used was a double wool crepe, which is an amazing fabric, doesn't really crease, and it comes in the most incredible range of colours.

8:57That's the designer Stuart Parvin. In the last decade or so of the late Queen's life, virtually all of her clothes were designed by him or her trusted confidant and personal dresser, Angela Kelly. The Queen's outfits oozed elegance and style, but there were also sensible choices which didn't reek of extravagance or flashiness. She just didn't like a fuss. We would often make a plain wool dress or a plain silk dress with a matching plain coat with it, or we'd do a printed silk dress or a printed wool dress with a plain coat over the top of it. So you had an element of simplicity, but with playful fun of the print, we used to choose the most beautiful prints.

9:38And she had an amazing eye for choosing things that stood out and were spectacular and often quite modern in their design. And then the print could always be picked up in the hat. But you might never see the floral part because the coat was never taken off. So you would go to her with your designs. She would then sort of mix and match or have her view and you would then work together. Can you tell us what the sort of dynamic... Oh, no, I would have a phone call from Angela. Angela and I would speak about what the Queen was needing things for. And I used to view it as her shopping trip. They would say, oh, yes, we've got a state visit.

10:12So I would work around the parameters of what I was given as a sort of idea. Sometimes they would be very specific. Oh, we're going on a trip. There's a red ballroom. We have to have a green dress to go with the ballroom. Can I ask about the importance of Angela and then her relationship in terms of influencing the Queen and informing her decisions about clothing and everything? She was obviously a very important figure, as you were in those final sort of decades or so of the Queen's life. How did that all work and what was the relationship between you all? Angela was the person who found me in the first place.

10:42So she came one day and sort of knocking on my door and saying she was looking for clothes for a very important person, not telling me it was the Queen. I didn't find out for a while afterwards. so she was the sort of the person who came with all the information I talked her through the sketches then she and the queen would have their moments together where they would talk about it all and I think they really enjoyed talking about it so everyone likes clothes that was one way it worked there Angela would design her own clothes with the queen I think that perhaps worked in a slightly different way then I would get the information back from Angela we would then discuss it more I would then create the clothes go for the fittings and Angela was often the person and say, oh, well, actually, maybe we need to do this.

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12:42You're listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Daniela Ralph and I travel the world reporting on the British royal family. Today, I'm reflecting on what the late Queen Elizabeth II wore during her long reign of 70 years and how some of the key pieces from her wardrobe are being shown in a new exhibition. I'm just walking through Windsor Great Park here to the farm building ahead of me, planes overhead going into land to Heathrow Airport. It's a relatively anonymous looking building here, but as we go inside, there is some magic. It's currently home to around 150 items of Queen Elizabeth II's wardrobe, and all of it is being prepared to go on display.

13:30And none of these outfits can go on display until they've been checked over. Some will be decades old, but the wear and tear on them is part of their story. In conservation, I can't fix it. I can't replace it. The life of the dress is part of the beauty of the dress. Cecilia Oliver looks after all the textiles that belong to the Royal Collection. Everything from tapestries and carpets right through to costumes. She's in charge of getting the late Queen's wardrobe ready for the exhibition. This is a large open space. There's lots of room to move tables around and spread objects out. Now we're about to get a big reveal, but before we do that, can you just give us a clue as to what's under here and how important a garment it is?

14:16Well, it's very, very exciting. Underneath here is the late Queen Elizabeth II's wedding dress. Let's have a look at it. Can you give us a grand unveiling?

14:32Oh my goodness. So this is her wedding dress from 1947. It is indeed. That she wore in Westminster Abbey. Wow. I mean, you're struck immediately by how intricate the beading is on it, but also I'm struck by how tiny it is. You're reminded that she was a small woman, a tiny woman. She was young as well. She was 21 when she got married. But she was a very petite build as well. It's the classic sort of fit and flair look. It was made with silk satin, And then it's been intricately embroidered. I think there's something like 10 ,000 seed pearls across the whole surface. There's silver threads, there's little crystals everywhere.

15:17And it's this really beautiful three-dimensional embroidery. So it's not flat, it's got texture. The roses here look like they're in bloom. Actually, on the pictures I've seen, the colourised pictures of the wedding, it looks a lot whiter. Here, it's quite a golden colour, the silk. It would have been off-white ivory, but silk does yellow as it ages. Can you explain what you've had to do to this dress then to conserve it and make it fit to show at the exhibition? So this silk at the time was washed in something called tin salts. And that gives us this luster, the sort of the sheen. It also gives the weight.

15:53So that classic sound we associate with silk, the sort of the rustling, that comes from washing it in the tin salts. unfortunately the tin salts cause the silk fibers to break down so what we're seeing across the surface is a breakdown of yeah so i can see if i as i look at it it's it's like the fabric has broken up into threads it's breaking you can see the threads in it we call it shattering but the tin salts will have exacerbated that process and sped it up so i'm supporting those weakened areas so that this dress is able to go on display you might notice that the majority of the damage is in this hip area and on the bodice and that's the area that takes most of the weight.

16:33Following the textile conservation mantra of support not repair, Celia showed me how she was using luxurious materials in keeping with the original creation. So this is an incredibly fine soft silk thread and it's dyed to match the colour of the dress and the colour of the net that's also dyed to match. I'm using a very very small curved needle. These are actually suture needles from a veterinary supplier and they need to be this small so that we don't damage the textile as we're stitching through it. And then when we do the stitching I'm putting the stitch into where the existing seams are. It's stronger because it's got two bits of fabric and the first stitch is just a double we'd never knot because a knot could be pulled and a knot could cause a hole and then it's simply a running stitch creating a very nice flat even stitch which should secure the net throughout the weight of the bodice.

17:35Cecilia you lead the way we're moving now from the room where the dress was to another space that you're working in here can you tell us what we're gonna see here Yeah, this is as if the dress wasn't enough. We've got the 15-foot train that attached to the shoulders of the dress and then just flowed behind her. And obviously the bridesmaids would have helped lay it all out and make it look beautiful as she walked down the aisle. And when you first see it laid out like this, you are just totally struck by the embroidery on it. Yes, so it has this orange blossom motif, which we see in the wedding dress as well.

18:10What's so beautiful about it is they start small at the top and as you move down to the end, the orange blossom gets bigger and bigger to fill the space. There's also this wheat sheaf motif and that's a symbol of fertility, so good things for the marriage. So there are these extraordinary meanings in everything we're looking at here. The orange blossom represents hope and then further down the end, there is a big sort of Tudor rose to represent her royalty and English monarch. Now to my naked eye it looks perhaps less damaged than the dress, is that right? This is in considerably better condition than the dress.

18:46This silk wasn't washed in tin salts which is what's causing a lot of the degradation in the dress. We do however put a lot of care into the correct storage of it. So it's all wrapped in layers of tissue and each layer is sort of folded over this big tissue wadge so that it's all supported and nothing's getting creased or damaged when it's in storage. And looking at the seed pearls, have you restored any beads that fall off or have they just not fallen off? Remarkably, they haven't fallen off. And that is actually a sign of the embroidery technique. So it was embroidered with a technique called timbre technique, where you stretch the fabric over sort of frame, timbre, drum, drum skin.

19:27I see. And each seed pearl was secured individually, which means if one goes, the whole lot doesn't go. In terms of conservation, has it needed much work? This needed very little work. I will do a bit of what we call humidification, which is conservation terms for ironing. We put a damp piece of blotting paper and then a membrane, Sympotex membrane, and then the fabric, and then we weight it down. And that allows a small amount of moisture to get into the fibres and causes the fibres to relax. So it's a bit like when your clothes come out of the washing and it's a bit easier to get the creases out because it's wet.

20:04Now, because this was a train, was it dirty? We have surface cleaned it, which means we've used a hoover on it. We've got a gentle, low suction, variable suction, and we've just gently wiped off any debris that might have been on the bottom from being pulled through the abbey. Back in the gallery, so many of the clothes on show were first worn during Queen Elizabeth's official visits around the world. She travelled to almost 300 countries during her reign, and in each one, what she wore mattered. Curator Caroline De Guito. So this dress, as you can see, the main feature really is this vivid combination of white and green.

20:47And of course, these colours echo the colours of the flag of Pakistan, also would have blended with the order of Pakistan with which the Queen was presented on the same day that she wore this dress for an evening reception with the president of Pakistan. And I think it's also a reminder that thinking about the Queen's clothing in 360 was really important because one of the most dramatic features of the dress, which is otherwise quite plainly tailored, no embellishment, you'll notice, even though it's Norman Hartnell, is this waterfall pleat lined in the emerald green satin. And it's shown this way around because I wanted visitors to remember that the back view is often as important, if not more so, than the front view.

21:30And this is very much a host-pleasing dress then, isn't it? It's saying something to her host in Pakistan. Definitely. The colour combination would have been so carefully thought about and immediately she appears wearing this diplomatic message. She doesn't even need to say anything. It's immediately recognised that this is a compliment to the host nation. And these two dresses here, which seem to me as full-on glamour, are dresses that she wore in India. That's right. So here we have two, as you can see, very heavily embellished dresses, quite different in their silhouette. This is 1961. Again, this long tour, six or seven weeks in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

22:08The dress on the left was worn for the state banquet given by the president of India on the Queen's first day. Two things really stand out. Obviously this rich and heavy encrustation of embroidery in pearls and sequins and beads. But if we look closely, it's not just about sparkle. This has messages within it because the dominant motif is the lotus flower, the emblem of India, paying respect to the nation she was visiting. and the one alongside a much more fitted sheath dress, a column dress really, has this blend of gold and pearl, again this idea of this embroidery, replicating the Zardozzi technique which is a traditional Indian technique of embellishment.

22:55So an indication of just how carefully thought through the production of this clothing really was. Did she always have something made bespoke for her? Was there ever anything that was just brought off the peg or was everything basically made to fit her specifically? A lot of her clothing was absolutely bespoke, but nonetheless there are lots of ready-to-wear pieces, her raincoats, her tweed skirts, even sometimes trousers, which we have on display here, particularly in that sort of off-duty sphere when she's dressing in a slightly more relaxed manner. So absolutely, yeah, there were things that were completely off the peg.

23:30But I think what's also important to remember is that she rewore and rewore her clothing. We have records kept by the dressers that show that pieces were worn 20, 30, 40 times, sometimes over multiple decades. So careful record keeping tells us so much about how the wardrobe was used. So she was an early adopter of sustainable dressing? I think she was an early adopter of sustainable dressing, yes. And it partly comes from that growing up during the Second World War, the idea of make, do and mend. And certainly amongst the accounts, there are lots of records of clothing being altered, hems being taken up or lengthened, pieces being repaired.

24:07And I think all of that contributes to this story about her relationship with clothing. The Queen was a walking saleswoman for British design and tailoring. She would ask her trusted designers to consider climate and culture in their pieces, always taking care, never to offend her hosts. Outfits for trips to Australia often incorporated yellow fabric. In Japan, there was a dress with kimono-shaped sleeves and sprays of cherry blossom across the skirt. And in Canada, maple leaf motifs were woven into a dress. How much did designer Stuart Parvin feel the pressure to get an outfit right? For me, it was do your job and I do my job, I hopefully do my job well, so therefore it never bothered me.

24:51And that was when one of the fans' first questions, would you like to do it? it's like of course I'll give you a week to think about it's like well why would I need a wink of course I'll do it it would be an honour and a privilege to do it but I think having Angela there who also had a innate knowledge of what people liked was a really important thing I mean yeah that's a really interesting point about dressing her I suppose isn't it there is a need there's all the stuff about her being seen and being noticed but you want the public to respond well to her as well in what she's you don't want it to become a problem what she's wearing do you Exactly.

25:23One, the clothes have to work so they're effortless. But two, people are going to see the Queen. They're not going to see their granny. They're not going to see a soap star. They're not going to see a film star. They're going to see the Queen. And so she has to look like the Queen. And although the Queen invented the way the Queen looked, every child expects the Queen's going to turn up with a crown on. Can I ask about the fabrics you used? I mean, what choices did you make there, particularly about being on show and moving between vehicles and all those kind of things? We use mainly all natural fibres, so wools, silks.