Ever since my book Fashioning the Crown (Faber & Faber, £25) was published earlier this year, I have often been asked to identify my favourite of Elizabeth II’s superb outfits. Although I admire her majestic evening gowns and regal ceremonial robes, I particularly love the off-duty clothes she wore in Scotland. These have a quiet and timeless elegance, as well as being practical, and they remind me of the occasions when, as the wife of Prince Philip’s godson, I saw her on shoot days at Balmoral, wearing a tweed jacket, tartan skirt, woollen stockings and sturdy brown leather brogues.
It has sometimes been said that her heart was in the Highlands and she certainly looked at ease there, as well as beautifully dressed — even in the yellow Marigold gloves she donned to wash up after picnic lunches in a bothy.
Elizabeth II's Coronation robes featured detailed embroidery of the floral emblems of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations using gold and silver thread, seed pearls and crystals.
'I could see [that her] Scottish tweed jacket was cut along similar lines to Christian Dior’s famous Bar jacket'
After the Queen’s death in 2022, when I was researching my book, I was fortunate to be allowed to study many of her clothes in the archives at Windsor Castle, where they were being catalogued for the current exhibition at The King’s Gallery (‘Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style’).
Amid the magnificent examples of royal couture deployed as sartorial statecraft and dress diplomacy, I was drawn to an impeccably tailored ensemble from the late 1940s, before she came to the throne.
The Scottish tweed jacket was made by Norman Hartnell, who created her fairy-tale wedding gown in 1947 and would go on to design her spectacular coronation robes in 1953. Examining it closely, I could see it was cut along similar lines to Christian Dior’s famous Bar jacket from his debut New Look collection of 1947, with a defined waist, neat buttons and gently padded shoulders.
If a contemporary model were to appear in the same tweed jacket at a Paris fashion show next month, it would look as perfect as it did eight decades ago on the young Princess Elizabeth. Needless to say, it would be no less appropriate on a heather-clad Scottish hillside this season.
The Princess’s Hartnell jacket was paired with a Balmoral tartan skirt: the same distinctive fabric that had been created in 1853 for her great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the year after they had purchased the Deeside estate.
The tartan is relatively discreet, at least by Victorian standards — predominantly grey, with red and black overchecks — and said to be designed by Prince Albert, who was inspired by the rugged granite of the Aberdeenshire landscape.
It was, of course, Victoria and Albert who made this area so fashionable during her reign, drawing tourists and tartan-buyers to the Highlands. The royal couple’s highly romanticised version of Scottish style was writ large in Balmoral Castle itself, which was constructed as a vast neo-Gothic building in the mid 1850s and bedecked with an abundance of tartan upholstery and furnishings to match the swirling royal kilts.
This idealised 19th-century aesthetic, subsequently dubbed ‘Balmorality’ or ‘tartanry’ by its cultural critics, has been derided as inauthentic and sentimental. Yet the decorative Balmoral tartan — which can only be worn by members of the Royal Family and the Piper to the Sovereign — has aged wonderfully well, as is evident in The King’s Gallery exhibition, where visitors can admire the late Queen’s skirt.
Pleated, but with less fabric than a traditional kilt, it has the same ageless appeal as her Scottish tweed jacket and, for me at least, it is impossible to see without remembering the last public picture of Elizabeth II, taken only two days before her death.
Framed in the reassuring surroundings of the Balmoral drawing room on September 6, 2022, as she prepared to meet the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, the Queen was smiling and wearing her signature pearls, with a soft grey wool cardigan, silk blouse and familiar-looking tartan skirt.
Although clearly frail, she looked every inch our monarch, as she always did, but also a natural Scottish countrywoman, at home in her favourite place in the world.
This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.