Queen Elizabeth II

Verdict: Mixed — critiqued with specific precision.

Dariaux's verdict on Queen Elizabeth II is one of the book's most instructive passages, not because it is harsh but because it is precise. The specific complaints: over-trimmed hats; open-toed shoes worn too often, too often in white; bad corseting. These are not vague criticisms of a general tendency. They are the diagnoses a skilled directrice makes on the evidence of photographs.

Her most elegant moment, in Dariaux's assessment, was the 1961 state visit to Pope John XXIII: protocol required all black, and the result was — by constraint — exactly right. The lesson is that constraint, rightly accepted, can function as the editor the wardrobe otherwise lacks. When the options are reduced by protocol, the choices that remain are often better.

This is the paradox of the Queen Elizabeth case: the most powerful woman in the room, with unlimited access to every dressmaker, and the most consistently constraining protocol in public life, produced her finest moments precisely when that protocol removed the possibility of error. Freedom of choice is not always an advantage in dress.

Constraint, rightly accepted, is often the editor's friend. A woman who cannot decide, or who decides badly when unconstrained, may benefit from the self-imposed protocol — the rule she sets for herself that removes the possibility of the small error. This is, in a sense, the institutional version of Self-Knowledge.

See Restraint for the cross-domain principle. See Discretion Until Eight for the principle of occasion-appropriate dress that the protocol enforced.