Peek Inside the Archive That Houses 500 Years of Royal Family Fashion
When a young Princess Elizabeth received sample shoes ahead of her wedding day to Philip Mountbatten, she was clearly delighted with the design. However, she did, it seems, have one major concern-that she would be able to walk comfortably down the aisle of Westminster Abbey to say her vows.
More than 70 years on from that historic day, the Queen’s sample wedding shoes are among 10,000 items tucked away in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Hampton Court Palace, south west of central London. Like everything in the collection, these sandals have a story to tell.
"This is the sample shoe that would have been shown to the then-Princess Elizabeth in 1947," Eleri Lynn, the curator responsible for the collection, tells T&C, wearing gloves to carefully handle the ivory satin piece made by British manufacturer Rayne.
"As you can see it’s unfinished, so she wouldn’t have worn it, but she would have seen it and approved the design. What we do know is that she certainly suggested that the heel wasn’t quite so thin because the real ones have a more solid thick heel, so that’s obviously something she thought about."
The ability of clothes to tell a story about the person who wears them is fascinating for anyone-but even more so when it comes to the royals, whose thoughts and desires often remain elusive to the general public. The Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection holds items going back almost 500 years relating to members of the Royal Family and their court or ceremonial life on the British Isles.
The collection is housed across 12 rooms that used to be the servants quarters of the Tudor palace, and roughly a third of the clothes were once worn by royals with the rest belonging to staff or those who attended court. Pieces owned by George III, Queen Victoria, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, and the Queen are cataloged and hung in white Tyvek bags, or laid in boxes if they are especially delicate, and kept in regulated temperature and humidity.
One such item is a Liberty print dress worn by Princess Elizabeth in 1936-the year her father unexpectedly became King George VI, and she found out she would eventually become Queen.
"What I really love about this dress is that she clearly loved it very much because it’s been very well-worn and mended and let out so she clearly got a lot of wear out of it," says Lynn.
"That idea of thrift and remaking and reuse is something you hear from a lot of her designers, that she’s always been very practically minded when it comes to clothes," Lynn continued.
The Queen was quite pragmatic about her children's clothes, as well.
"One of her designers, David Sassoon, remembers going to Buckingham Palace for a fitting," Lynn explained. "It was a fitting for Princess Anne, and the Queen came in and asked 'Will it wash?'"
Another item once belonging to the current Queen is a silk dress that she wore when she was 11 months old. The little peach outfit is accompanied by a photograph of the princess with her nanny Clara Knight.
Like a lot of the clothing housed at Hampton Court, this dress was bought at auction after being handed down by Clara’s descendants. There is no automatic process for royal clothes to make their way into the collection, and it is run by charity Historic Royal Palaces, not the royal family or its household.
That said, many of the items are brought out to go on display in exhibitions in royal palaces. For example Diana’s dresses were recently on show at Kensington Palace.
In addition to the glamorous gowns the Princess of Wales was known for, there are also less recognizable items relating to Diana stored at Hampton Court, including a tweed jacket from the 1970s that she is thought to have owned before she met Charles.
"This is [from] before she became princess," says Lynn of the jacket, "but it’s really of her style as a young woman because she was very sloaney ... the style that was really in favor with young girls, mainly aristocratic young ladies who were often in the country."
The jacket helps to illustrate how Diana's style evolved over the course of her life.
"[The jacket is] an unexpected object for Diana. She stepped onto the international stage so young and had to learn how to dress as a working royal princess, and she really honed her look very quickly," says Lynn.
"Like all of us she learned her style over a number of years, so by the time she was in her 30s as a confident working woman, championing her humanitarian causes and dressing in these incredibly glamorous dresses, she had found her style. As a young woman she was very fashionable. This was very fashionable in the late '70s."
Lynn points out that it was in the mid-1980s that Diana cultivated a more "timeless" look.
In addition to clothes, there are also sketches and letters, including ones written from Diana to David Sassoon, one of her longest-serving designers, who crafted the going away outfit for her wedding day.
One letter she penned in 1987 about a white dress he made for her reads, "Everyone up here went wild about the long white dress!" Another asks for modifications to a design of his.
The collection also houses the black outfits that Queen Victoria wore following the death of her husband Albert. The prince died in 1861, and Victoria remained in mourning until her own death in 1901. These pieces reveal how her staff dealt with the fact she wore so much black.
"In a lot of Queen Victoria’s clothes, often a little white label, a little bit of white fabric is sewn in the back," Lynn says. "That’s so that her laundresses and her maids know when it’s dirty and it needs a wash."
Notably, the oldest item in the collection is thought to be the Bristowe Hat. Made of plum-colored silk with a green ostrich feather, it is believed to have been given to keeper of the royal wardrobe Nicholas Bristowe by Henry VIII and dates back to the 1540s.
"If it belonged to Henry VIII or not, we can’t prove. But the fact that the family believed it was, they kept it almost like a relic, and that’s why it survived," Lynn says. "They kept it in pristine condition."
About 40 percent of the items are menswear, including some belonging to King Edward VIII, who abdicated after just 11 months on the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Describing him as a "real dandy" Lynn says, "The best tailor on Saville Row at the time wouldn’t make the kind of trousers that he wanted, because he wanted American-style trousers, which were high-waisted trousers with a belt, and the English style at the time was to wear it with braces, no belt."
She continues, "Often he would send the fabric to America to have his trousers made in the American style. Wallis Simpson called them his 'pants across the sea.'"
When clothes arrive to be part of the collection they are usually frozen for three to four days to eradicate pests and their eggs. Once catalogued-a process now done digitally-they are put away until needed for an exhibition, a private viewing, or when they are taken out for audits.
"Hopefully every object will have its moment," Lynn says of the opportunity for the pieces to be seen in public.
With such a spotlight on the royal fashion of Kate and Meghan, could any of their much-photographed outfits one day find their way into this huge closet of historic secrets?
"It would be well-within our collecting remit and our collecting policy to collect something that belongs to a current member of the royal family ... We would like to do so if it did come up," Lynn says.
However, the collection does not yet have any items relating to the young royals.
As Lynn says, "It’s still a working wardrobe and this story is still unfolding."
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