As wedding season approaches, we turn to an unlikely source of fresh style inspiration for older women, the newly crowned Queen Camilla.
Every time I see a photo of Queen Camilla I’m struck by the line she has to walk, fashion-wise. She has to look smart but to avoid dowdy, to always be appropriate for long days of meeting and greeting subjects and dignitaries, and to ratchet up the flash for state occasions. At 75, she just stepped into the biggest job of her life, by her husband’s side as he begins his reign. Don’t you think dressing for the coronation must have been terrifying? I panic at finding a dress to attend a wedding as a guest, but there was grandmother of five, Camilla, in a full-length white gown balancing a priceless five-pound crown in front of 20 million people!
Camilla and Charles wed when they were aged 57 and 56, respectively. She pulled off her first major fashion moment spectacularly, in a pale blue and gold embroidered coat by Robinson Valentine with a feathered hat dipped in gold leaf by Philip Treacy. I single out this look because promptly thereafter the then Duchess of Cornwall faded into the background with a range of solid, workaday looks centred around structured coat dresses with matching hats. Nice, but unexciting. In this manner, for nearly 20 years, she left the flashbulbs and the wardrobe coverage to the younger generation royal wives, first Kate, then Meghan.
But Camilla is now prime time, and her look has already started to polish up with the new title. The late Queen Elizabeth worked a highly successful signature look: a photo carousel-ready rainbow of head-to-toe brights and sherberts, through the last three decades of her reign. Camilla, however, is there to support her husband, not outshine him. Plus, fashion was never really her thing. After all, Camilla is very much the rough-and-ready country sort, mucking about Wiltshire on her horses and in the garden. Lest we forget she was the other woman for many years and had to work her way very slowly and carefully to be accepted by a British public obsessed with her predecessor. In the ’90s, Camilla often seemed as though she’d positioned herself as the opposite to Diana in terms of style, choosing an earthy contrast to Diana’s glamour.
One of the key elements of Camilla’s queenly makeover has been her hair: She still has a version of the flip she wore when Charles first fell under her spell in 1972, but now it is a soft champagne blond. She loves good jewelry and wears big rocks with aplomb, a necessary skill when you become part of the Windsor family, where the average family jewel is the size of a hard candy. The big jewels work on her because she is clearly comfortable in her own skin. Confidence should be one of the great benefits of aging, though many of us have trouble getting to that inner headspace past the surface wrinkles and sags. Wearing bold jewelry, whether Crown Jewels or costume, is a skill we can all take a cue from. It’s the fastest way to elevate any look, plus drawing the eye to something shiny, helps distract from areas you may prefer to call less attention to.
Now that she is Queen, Camilla is expanding into bolder blues — see the cornflower blue coat dress by Fiona Clare she wore for her pre-coronation portraits. Clare is one of her go-to designers, along with Bruce Oldham, who designed the coronation gown. As The Telegraph said of Oldham’s gown, he used his dressmaking skill to create confidence for Camilla on the big day by carefully positioning seams and linings to give the garment substance and clean lines: “The inner workings of his gowns typically flatter and enhance the wearer’s figure — the support and scaffolding on offer makes them popular with older clients.”
