'Gold and Silver by Night' Queen Alexandra - A Life in Colour

A book generated from a selection of papers given at the 2014 Costume Colloquium conference in Florence. My chapter considers how Alexandra, Princess of Wales and later Queen used colour in her clothing choices to both attract and deflect attention from aspects of her public and private life

Fashioning Alexandra: a sartorial biography of Queen Alexandra 1844-1925

In the second half of the 19th century, Alexandra Princess of Wales and later Queen Consort to her husband Edward VII became one of the most recognizable women of the period. Her image was circulated around the globe by the million and her every movement recorded daily in The Times. Despite her contemporary celebrity, she has become a lesser-known figure in modern history. With little in the way of political influence, Alexandra recognized that her appearance in public was powerful. She used clothes throughout her life to both display and disguise herself. despite the centrality of dress in her life, no other study has ever examined her remaining items of clothing until now.This thesis considers in detail those garments that have survived from Queen Alexandra’s wardrobe, most of which, owing to their geographic spread, have never been studied before. This object-led approach allows an analysis of a life, which has been considered before in more traditional biographies. However, the close examination of the garments and of Alexandra’s approach to her clothing reveals aspects never before considered. It has also prompted the consideration of previously under researched areas such as royal laundry, the role of the dresser and the logistics of 19th century royal travel. As a multi-disciplinary project it has shed new light onto Alexandra’s life and dispelled certain apocryphal stories which only the material culture itself could reveal

Reporting Royal Dress: Queen Alexandra and Royal Image Making

This chapter considers the origins of the Court Circular as a means of disseminating royal style, specifically the clothing worn by Queen Alexandra. It examines the embedded knowledge of dress and fabrics in the public consciousness and the print descriptions of formal clothing shared with the general public. The image making of Queen Alexandra and her canny use of dress as a means of cementing her public popularity played out through these descriptions

Rediscovering Queen Alexandra’s Wardrobe: The Challenges and Rewards of Object-Based Research

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

Pattern As Memento - the Case of the 19thc Dress Diary

Memorialising lives through the ‘album-ising’ of paper scraps, photographic montages and collages is a well documented female Victorian hobby, but in 2016 I was given a very special example by an elderly friend – an album of dress scraps compiled by one woman from the 1830s to the 1870s. Albums relating to dress are scarce and under-researched. Barbara Johnson’s album of 18th century fabrics is perhaps the best known in the genre, memorialising the wardrobe of one woman but few others survive and those that do have been rarely documented. Early research has revealed not only the owner of the album but some of the circumstances of her life. It records the life through dress of Anne Sykes, her family and friends recorded through the inclusion of dress fabrics from dozens of those in her social circle. Each swatch is cut into the same shape and each page has been organised into a distinct sartorial pattern. Other patterns emerge through analysis of its pages – the patterns of consumption of this community of women in the North of England recorded within its pages, patterns of fashionable fabrics dispelling myths about provincial access to prevailing styles and the pattern of writing the details of each hexagonal piece of fabric so carefully pasted into the book. This paper will consider the memorialisation of these lives through dress fragments, what this pattern of album creation represented and the multi-disciplinary potential of fragmentary material culture

Inside the royal wardrobe: a dress history of Queen Alexandria

Queen Alexandra used clothes to fashion images of herself as a wife, a mother and a royal: a woman who both led Britain alongside her husband Edward VII and lived her life through fashion. 'Inside the Royal Wardrobe' overturns the popular portrait of a vapid and neglected queen, examining the surviving garments of Alexandra, Princess of Wales – who later became Queen Consort – to unlock a rich tapestry of royal dress and society in the second half of the 19th century. More than 130 extraordinary garments from Alexandra's wardrobe survive, from sumptuous court dress and politicised fancy dress to mourning attire and elegant coronation gowns, and can be found in various collections around the world, from London, Oslo and Denmark to New York, Toronto and Tokyo. Curator and fashion scholar Kate Strasdin places these garments at the heart of this in-depth study, examining their relationships to issues such as body politics, power, celebrity, social identity and performance, and interpreting Alexandra's world from the objects out. Adopting an object-based methodology, the book features a range of original sources from letters, travel journals and newspaper editorials, to wardrobe accounts, memoirs, tailors' ledgers and business records

Alexandra of Denmark: Fashioning the Modern Consort

In this edited volume of Queens Consort, this is a biographical summary of Queen Alexandra analysed through the lens of dress and how she fashioned both her public and private self. It considers her life through dress, both through surviving objects in different museum collections and through other historical records, paintings and memoirs. Abstract For so relatively recent a queen consort, Alexandra (1844–1925) is a figure whose reputation has arguably found itself built on mythologised narratives. Popular perceptions position her as the beleaguered wife of an unpredictable husband, Edward VII—whose scandals eclipsed her own experiences. It is often her enduringly youthful appearance that is most remarked upon, yet previous biographies have not explored how she came to capitalise on this. This chapter considers Alexandra’s dress practices to explore more traditional approaches to life writing. Her garments have survived in museums around the world, covering different decades of her life. Using these alongside a variety of written sources and images, it is possible to build on existing biographical works. Looking at her world through the lens of clothing reveals much about her upbringing, her life at the heart of the British establishment, and how she used dress to control public perceptions of her royal role