How <em>The Crown</em>, and Its Clothes, Transform Power

Clothes, in The Crown, have always been part of the aesthetic pleasure the show provides viewers—a crucial element of the absurd spectacle that is royalist Britain, with its fairytale carriages and gilded rooms, its Sèvres porcelain and Harris tweed. And yet, watching Season 3, I’ve come to appreciate more than ever how the series uses clothing to explore and subvert ideas about power, and what it looks like when a woman wields it. Typically when women gain access to a man’s world in popular culture they dress the part, adopting masculine tailoring and fabrics: Think Tess McGill’s gray herringbone suit and heavy shoulder pads. The Queen is different. Her gender, and her femininity, are intrinsic to the way she governs.

The Crown’s costume designer, Jane Petrie, uses clothing to offer glimpses of insight into a character who, in Season 3, is becoming more and more unknowable. The first episode opens on the Queen sitting by a window, but it takes two and a half minutes before the camera gives a clear shot of her face. Instead, we see the symbols that have come to stand for her: a crown atop a head of regimented curls, the gates of Buckingham Palace flanked by two Welsh Guards, a pair of corgis striding across an ornately carpeted room. When Colman’s Queen finally comes into focus, she’s surrounded by a phalanx of men in dark suits. She, by contrast, wears a lilac dress with a love knot detail over her breastbone, high-heeled black shoes, and pale stockings with seams running down toward her heels. Her authority is such that the men around her bend slightly backward when she enters the room, as if to surrender even the airspace to the head of state.

In reality, as in the show, the Queen’s deployment of pastel colors and pearls isn’t just a matter of personal taste. Since her coronation in 1953, when the Queen requested that her gown for the event be embroidered with symbols from countries in the British commonwealth—English roses, Canadian maple leaves, Scottish thistle—every outfit she’s worn has been worn with intention. Clothing, for the Queen, is much more about diplomacy and visibility than style. In her recent book Our Rainbow Queen: A Tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and Her Colorful Wardrobe, the writer Sali Hughes investigates some of the subtext of the Queen’s wardrobe, revealing that the monarch never matches her color palette to any country’s flag to avoid accusations of partiality. And her penchant for bright colors, Hughes argues, isn’t about the monarch’s own preference: It’s to ensure that the people who’ve waited several hours will be better able to see her.

What The Crown suggests, though, is that the Queen also uses the clothes she wears to underscore her own authority. Season 3 is set in the 1960s and ’70s, capturing the period between the Queen’s 40th birthday and her Silver Jubilee in 1977—when she was no longer a young woman but still habitually the only woman in most official situations. Like Foy’s character before her, Colman’s Queen wears comfier clothes when she’s off-duty or at leisure: printed blouses, cashmere sweaters, Hèrmes scarves knotted over her shoulders. When she goes to the races, in her function as a breeder of horses, she cheerfully wears garish floral prints and hats covered in tiny petals. But in meetings with the prime minister, or when she’s obliged to dress down someone who’s stepped out of line, the Queen wears plain linen suits in darker colors. The outfit she wears to scold the statesman Louis Mountbatten (Charles Dance) recalls the military-green suit Claire Foy wore in Season 2 to deride the four prime ministers she’s outlasted as “a confederacy of elected quitters.” (Foy’s outfit was accessorized with a pillbox hat, a diamond brooch, and a defiant—even disdainful—tilt to the chin.)