Justine Picardie’s fascinating new book Fashioning the Crown is — as its subtitle, “A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture”, would suggest — all about using clothes to bolster a cause. The cause in this case was our royal family — buffeted, in the early decades of the last century, first by two world wars against a country with whom their nationality was inconveniently intertwined, and second by an abdication crisis prompted by a couple who definitely understood the power of clothes, although possibly not much else.
It was partly to take on the rigorously chic modernism of the Duchess of Windsor that, when Queen Elizabeth accompanied her husband George VI on a state visit to France in July 1938, she was dressed like someone out of the Franz Xaver Winterhalter paintings which hang on the walls of Buckingham Palace. (The Queen’s dressmaker Norman Hartnell recalled being shown the pictures by the King and asked to conjure up “the regal renaissance of the romantic crinoline”.)
The two dolls, Marianne and France, in their Citroën sports cars
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That same state visit to France was the occasion of another charming — and pint-sized — manifestation of that particular variety of soft power which comes in the form of fashion. Picardie tells the story of the two dolls that were created as a gift from “the children of France” to the two British princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, who were then aged 12 and 7.
What jetsetters they were, the brunette Marianne and the blonde France, each just under 3ft tall, with their wardrobes of Parisian couture by Jeanne Lanvin, Jean Patou and Madeleine Vionnet among others, their Hermès handbags, their Cartier jewellery, their Louis Vuitton luggage. (Neither Coco Chanel nor Elsa Schiaparelli, two of the biggest names in French fashion, took part, though it’s a mystery as to why.)
Princess Elizabeth on the steps of Y Bwthyn Bach (The Little Cottage) in Windsor Great Park, c1933
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They had been created in the celebrated Jumeau doll workshops, or, as the French newspaper Le Journal liked to put it, in “a cheerful-looking factory where every day of the year little porcelain girls and boys are born”. And they each had their own Citroën sports car, naturellement, one olive green, one cornflower blue, in which they were photographed for the Illustrated London News. Le Journal described them — accurately, I would imagine — as “the best-dressed dolls in the world”.
In a letter to her French tutor, Princess Elizabeth wrote that the dolls were “nearly as tall as Margaret”. And she couldn’t get over their clothes “… The dresses! Oh! It is almost impossible to say… One is covered in little frills.” She was just as taken with Marianne’s “leopard-skin coat”.
Picardie observes the peculiar dissonance in the dolls’ wardrobes. They had the bodies of children yet, by and large, the outfits of adults, primarily “glamorous gowns” and “alluring negligees, often replicas of the latest fashions of the season”. Though there was also a blue wool school dress by Robert Piguet thrown into the mix. (This was the house where the young Christian Dior was working at the time. He would found his own label in 1946.)
• The doll’s house with its own set of Crown Jewels
France in an Ascot dress, Marianne in an ermine cape
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The dolls also wore flat shoes with socks, not stockings, and had prams and monogrammed cots. Confusing, but then escapism doesn’t have to make sense, and escapism was what was needed more than anything, during an epoch when the clouds of war were massing on the horizon.
Now confined to storage in Windsor Castle, they haven’t been seen in years, but are part of the Royal Collection Trust, so could in theory be exhibited again. In their day they attracted huge crowds, most of them adults. The ever-excitable Le Journal reported that, in Paris, “an endless process of admirers had patiently queued to see, at last, the trousseaux, possessions and the two ‘ambassadresses’ about which they had read so much”.
In London, in December of that same year, The Times welcomed the “doubly happy” idea of the St James’s Palace exhibition of the dolls, while acknowledging, as Britain and France grappled with Hitler’s increasing bellicosity, that “their fame has hitherto been a little overshadowed by the grossier [coarse] and noisier links” which bound the two countries.
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There was nothing new in the idea of royal dolls, but never had they become public property to this degree. In the past they had been sent to the daughters of European royalty as betrothal gifts. Picardie refers, by way of one example, to the “richly dressed dolls [which] accompanied the six-year-old Princess Isabella, the daughter of Charles VI, when in 1396, she travelled from her home in France to England as the child bride of Richard II”.
Marianne and France were different in that they were intended not only as an entente cordiale between two nations but as a personification — dollification? — of the potency of the French fashion industry. In this they were a blueprint for the so-called Théâtre de la Mode of 200 dolls that was created immediately after the Second World War. It toured Europe and America to showcase the work of more than 50 Parisian fashion houses, with the intention of drumming up some much-needed business. (No Chanel again, but Schiaparelli was in the line-up this time, as was another new addition, Balenciaga.) Some of those dolls are still on display at the Maryhill Museum of Art in America.
What are the modern catwalks, which kick off again in New York this week, if not another kind of dollification? Marianne and France may be of a different epoch, yet the mannequin still rules.
Fashioning the Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture (Faber, £25) by Justine Picardie will be published on February 26
date:2026-02-12 04:10:00
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