Channelling Camilla
ELIZABETH RENZETTI reports from London on fashion's unlikely new muse: Camilla Parker Bowles
if(typeof sIFR == "function"){ runSIFR(); }By
ELIZABETH RENZETTI
Saturday, March 5, 2005 Updated at 5:35 PM EST
LONDON -- One of the nice things about Camilla Parker Bowles is that, even when she's done up radiantly in a raspberry Jean Muir gown, it always seems like there might be a bit of dog dirt on her shoe.
She will never be the leggy clotheshorse that Princess Diana was. Nor will she ever be a portrait-perfect figurehead, nary a hair out of place, like the Queen. But she's travelled far from the days when her
Spitting Image puppet was one degree removed from Secretariat and Mr. Blackwell compared her to "a dilapidated Yorkshire pudding."
And she's got her own constituency. Improbable as it may seem, Camilla's equestrian chic -- complete with straining buttons and clomping shoes -- has been embraced on the catwalks of Europe. Don't take my word for it: Listen to her fellow Brit, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who saw Burberry's new collection last week and bestowed her approval with the words, "very Camilla Parker Bowles."
At Milan Fashion Week, designers showed for fall a great sweep of country-house "Camilla chic," from Burberry's tweed skirts and thick hose to Marni's flowing, elbow-length-sleeve coats. Prada's and Pringle's collections are heavy with tapestry-like fabrics and voluminous skirts, a nod to country houses where the only thing mouldier than the carpets is the food.
It's a world (perhaps a mythological one) recognizable to the vast majority of us only through films like
The Shooting Party or
Gosford Park, and the novels of Nancy Mitford or Elizabeth Jane Howard. (The Mitford connection is apt: Charles and Camilla are friends with the youngest and only surviving Mitford sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, and sometimes vacation at her grand house, Chatsworth.)
Maybe the fashion world has realized there's only so much inspiration to be drawn from Gwyneth Paltrow's youthful, macrobiotics-sprinkled years. Or is it that, after years of scorning her as a frump, the cognoscenti has learned her secret: The easiest way to be stylish is not to give a rat's bottom about style?
Let's look at the dress Camilla wore on the night her engagement was announced, because it's instructive. Jean Muir is a fine London label, favoured by the type of lady who regards flashiness as the proper domain of footballers' wives. The deep pink jersey dress clung to Parker Bowles's majestic bosom (although under the camera lights her undergarments were a little exposed) and discreetly skirted an abdomen that is not trampoline-taut.
But who needs Halle Berry's belly when you have Parker Bowles's accessories? On one hand, she wore the lovely, old-fashioned diamond ring that once belonged to the Queen Mother, and on the other arm she had the Prince of Wales, who looked, in his blue-and-red jacket, either like an organ grinder's monkey or a member of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
She seemed like a woman who is making an effort at elegance, more for the sake of her man and her new public role than any inborn desire to shine. And if her hem came down, we knew she wouldn't cry like a Hollywood princess but pull a sewing kit from her evening bag and tack it back it up. Says Camilla's biographer, Caroline Graham, from Los Angeles, "Most people who don't know her look at her and say, 'What the hell is he doing with her? She looks like a horse. She's not attractive.' Which is unfair to her because in person she's quite a bit prettier than she is in photographs. She's getting better looking now that she has people around her who are helping her do her hair and dress. But it's the personality and character he fell for, and that's the woman he loves."
As depicted in Graham's 2001 book,
Camilla: Her True Story, Camilla is raunchy, bawdy, fun-loving, discreet and loyal. In the classic manner of well-born Englishwomen (her mother was Lord Ashcombe's daughter and her father a decorated war hero), she would rather hunt than shop, and her tastes lean more to Barbour than Dior. There is a sensuous earthiness to Camilla common to many horse-loving girls. If anything, she is a fairy godmother to today's Sloane Rangers -- young, upper-crust socialites who prowl London's designer shops and It spots dressed in Wellingtons and eggy sweaters.
"She wasn't particularly clothes-conscious; nothing's changed there. But she always exuded a sexy confidence over men," a friend of Camilla's recalls in Graham's book.
Another gives a more pungent assessment: "You're not sure whether they're today's knickers she's got on."
Much has changed since Camilla entered the public eye, and not merely her underwear (one can only assume that her stiff upper deck is the result of shopping at Rigby and Peller, purveyor of undergarments to the Queen). She has had her teeth fixed, wears designers like the glam queen Amanda Wakeley, and tried to quit smoking.
But she's still herself. Says Graham, "She's not a glamourpuss. That's not Camilla. She probably doesn't even know what Botox is. She certainly doesn't go the gym. Her exercise is walking the dogs, riding. She enjoys eating, she likes a stiff drink. She enjoys her gin and tonic at the end of the day."
She probably needs one now more than ever, as her wedding day is rapidly changing. Her future mother-in-law will not attend the civil marriage service; it can't be easy to know that two of the things closest to her fiancé's heart -- this marriage and the throne -- might be mutually incompatible. And more than one-third of the respondents to a Daily Telegraph poll published this weekend thought that the British monarchy would be weakened by Charles and Camilla's marriage.
But the love affair that began on a polo field more than three decades ago will not be denied. On April 8, Camilla and Charles will be wed in the Guildhall at Windsor, followed by a blessing and reception at Windsor Castle. Camilla's wedding outfit is being created by London designers Antonia Robinson and Anna Valentine, who have dressed her in the past. She'll wear a hat by Philip Treacy (although probably not one of the Dr. Seuss confections that Isabella Blow favours).
As for jewels, perhaps Camilla will wear some of the Alice Keppel jewellery that Charles has bought for her at auction. Keppel, Camilla's great-grandmother and paramour of King Edward VII, holds a special place in her heart. When Camilla and Charles met all those years ago, she is said, famously, to have piqued his interest with the words, "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress. How about it?"
The British people may never warm to Camilla the way they did to Diana, but she can be queen in the hearts of all the fiftysomething women around the world who might ditch their plastic-surgery gift certificates and Spanx, secure in the knowledge that some middle-aged men actually like middle-aged women's bodies.
I got a little shock the other day when I realized that Farrah Fawcett, born in 1947, is a few months older than Camilla Parker Bowles. Neither of them looks like they did when they were younger, although one was transformed by the elements of nature and the other by the knives of science. Farrah Fawcett was a beautiful woman who let vanity ride roughshod over better sense and now looks like her head got caught in a shrink-wrap machine. Camilla Parker Bowles was a rather plain girl who made the best of what she had and let high spirits do the rest. Which of them, do you think, is happier when she looks in the mirror?
Source: Globe and Mail