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Abstract
Alexandra, born a princess of Denmark, married Queen Victoria’s eldest son Edward, prince of Wales, in 1863. She became an iconic princess of Wales whose position was central to the reinvigoration of the British monarchy in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was not permitted a public voice and so used dress instead as a means of controlling perceptions of her royal self. Aware of the growing influence of the media, Alexandra was able to maintain immense popularity, arguably through the positive image generated through her physical appearance. This article, part of a wider study into the clothing practices of Alexandra of Denmark, takes three prominent surviving garments from her wardrobe and applies an object-based methodology to life writing, offering a biography of both the person and the clothes she inhabited. This multi-disciplinarity between object and text creates a discourse that highlights both the value of material culture but also the challenges faced for the researcher in this context.
Notes
1 Sarah Tooley, The Life of Queen Alexandra (London, 1902); Georgina Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra (London, 1972); David Duff, Alexandra Princess and Queen (London, 1980).
2 Valerie Steele, ‘A Museum of Fashion is More Than a Clothes Bag’, Fashion Theory 2 (1998), pp. 327-336, p. 327.
3 Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much — Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, The Journal of American History 88 (2001), pp. 129-144, p. 129.
4 Roger Fulford, Dearest Mama: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia 1861–1864 (London, 1968), p. 53.
5 Jane Ridley, Bertie A Life of Edward VII (London, 2012), pp. 58, 125, 134, 149.
6 Duff, Alexandra Princess and Queen, pp. 183-4.
7 Duff, Alexandra Princess and Queen, p. 202.
8 Richard Hough, Edward and Alexandra (London, 1992), p. 225; Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra, p. 198.
9 John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003), p. 55
10 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 2000), p. 118.
11 Lou Taylor, ‘Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress History’, Fashion Theory 2 (1998), pp. 337-358, p. 338.
12 John Styles, ‘Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain’, Fashion Theory 2 (1998), pp. 383-392, p. 383.
13 Styles, ‘Dress in History’, p. 385.
14 This doctoral project, completed in 2013, was published in 2017 as Kate Strasdin, Inside the Royal Wardrobe — A Dress History of Queen Alexandra (London, 2017).
15 Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim, The Dress Detective (London, 2015), p. 22.
16 Kay Staniland, In Royal Fashion (London, 1997), p. 15.
17 Livrustkammer Museum, http://livrustkammaren.se/en/explore/collections
18 The list is by no means definitive. I am certain there are other garments associated with Queen Alexandra that I have yet to discover, either in private collections or smaller institutions.
19 This last was the band leader Jack Hylton who sold one of Queen Alexandra’s dresses at auction in the early 1940s to raise money for the war effort. How he came to be in possession of one of her court gowns remains a mystery.
20 Few of Alexandra’s garments have been properly mounted or photographed, hence the absence of photographed objects in this article.
21 Glenn Adamson, ‘The Case of the Missing Footstool: Reading the Absent Object’, in Karen Harvey (ed), History and Material Culture (London and New York, 2009), pp. 192-207, p. 192.
22 The handling of historic textiles is governed by a strict code of practice. ICOM — The International Council for Museums has a series of guidelines for the care and preservation of textile collections: http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/costume/pdf/guidelines_english.pdf (accessed 14 May 19).
23 Staniland, In Royal Fashion, p. 7.
24 Only once throughout the course of this project was I able to view an object of Alexandra’s at first hand both flat and then later mounted. This was a yachting jacket now in the collection of the Fashion Museum, Bath, which I first examined lying flat on a study table but which was later mounted for a sportswear exhibition. The difference was enormous, the shaping of the body beneath making a vast difference to the appearance of the object.
25 Late Victorian silk for clothing was tin-weighted, a chemical treatment applied to the fabric in order to create a rustling texture but which subsequently causes shattering to the silk especially in areas of wear such as under the arm and at the waistband. The weight of embellishments can also jeopardise the integrity of the foundation and thus recording becomes problematic.
26 The Royal Archives, Windsor, Geraldine Somerset, un-catalogued diary.
27 Jeremy Maas, The Prince of Wales’s Wedding (London, 1977), p. 64.
28 Historic Royal Palaces, Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, RCIN 71943.
29 Nigel Arch and Joanna Marschner, Royal Wedding Dresses (London, 2003), p. 10.
30 Margaret Tomlinson, Three Generations in the Honiton Lace Trade: A Family History (self- published, 1983).
31 Devon Record Office, 1037M/F2/1: letter from W Wills to Mary Tucker.
32 These subtle acts acknowledging her Danish identity might include her forty-year correspondence with her sister Dagmar, Tsarina Maria Feodorovna of Russia, which is written entirely in Danish. Whenever the two sisters met in the 1870s, they dressed entirely alike.
33 Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London, 2012), p. 118.
34 Royal Archives, Windsor, RA/Z/449/51: letter from Queen Alexandra to her son Edward.
35 Valerie Cumming, Royal Dress (Batsford, 1989), p. 132; Anon, The Woman and Home (1895), p. 16.
36 It is possible that Alexandra’s patterns of consumption may have been influenced by the worsening relations between Britain and Denmark during the 1860s but there is no actual written evidence I have found to support this theory.
37 Historic Royal Palaces, Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, 1994. 212/1-2.
38 EAD, New York Times, 10 August 1902, n.p.
39 Audrey Linkman, The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (New York, 1993) p. 81.
40 Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold (Maidstone, 1973), p. 132; Lady Mary Meynell, Sunshine and Shadows (London, 1933), p. 119.
41 Cited in James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary (London, 1959) p. 328.
42 See Staniland, In Royal Fashion for a more detailed analysis of garments from the previous Coronation, that of Queen Victoria in 1837; and Roy Strong, Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century (London, 2006).
43 Zillah Halls, Coronation Costume 1685–1953 (London, 1973), p. 53.
44 Ibid.
45 Katia Johansen, ‘Magnificence des Rois Danois: Costumes de Couronnement et Habits de Chevaliers’, in Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel and Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros (eds), Fastes de Cour et Ceremonies Royales (Paris, 2009), p. 140.
46 Full length sketch of Alexandra, as Princess of Wales, by Nicholas Chevalier shows this garment of Danish colours, Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 926235.
47 Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra, p. 92.
48 Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 942.12.3.A-B
49 Jean Druesdow, e-mail 2 November 2011.
50 Jean Spence, ‘Flying on One Wing’, in Alison Guy and Maura Banim, Through the Wardrobe — Women’s Relationship With Their Clothes (Oxford, 2001), p. 186.
51 Cassie Davies-Strodder, Jenny Lister and Lou Taylor, London Society Fashion 1905–1925: The Wardrobe of Heather Firbank (London, 2015), p. 149.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kate Strasdin
Kate Strasdin is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Falmouth University in the South West of the UK and a Specialist Visiting Lecturer for the DeTao Masters Academy in Shanghai. Her research centres around the dress practices of women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, diverse figures ranging from early women mountaineers to Queen Alexandra. Her first book Inside the Royal Wardrobe — A Dress History of Queen Alexandra was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. She is an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society and is Deputy Curator of the Totnes Fashion and Textiles Museum.