Duchess of Cambridge effect sparks buying frenzy
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
This article titled “‘Duchess of Cambridge effect’ sparks international buying frenzy over dress” was written by Jess Cartner-Morley, for The Guardian on Friday 27th May 2011 12.01 UTCReiss, an understated, privately owned British label of 40 years’ standing, has been catapulted into the limelight by a new phenomenon in fashion: the Duchess of Cambridge effect.
Within hours of the new duchess being photographed chatting to Michelle Obama at Buckingham Palace this week in a beige bandage-style Shola outfit by the British high street label, the dress – which retails for £175 – had sold out worldwide. Unprecedented traffic caused the website to crash twice before the end of the day.
“I have been in the business for 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this reaction,” said founder David Reiss, “and not just in the UK, but overseas”.
Profit from sales of the Shola dress are capped by the fact only 1,000 were produced, but “you can’t put a monetary value on this kind of brand awareness and excitement. As a brand we’ve always been understated – maybe even too discreet about who we are. This has given us an incredible platform without straying from who we are as a brand.”
The duchess shops at Reiss without prior appointment, paying full price, David Reiss confirmed. “I am sure she would never accept gifts, and we would never offer them.” The first inkling the label had of this week’s publicity was on Tuesday morning, when buying director Andy Rogers saw on Twitter that Jane Bruton, the editor of Grazia, had posted a link to the dress.
“As soon as the picture came up on the news my assistant recognised the dress. She checked the website and 30 seconds later we had the link up on Twitter,” said Bruton.
This is the second time the label has been championed by the duchess. In official engagement portraits taken by Mario Testino she wore a draped cream Nanette dress, bought for £159 from the store’s autumn 2010 collection, which fuelled a spike in sales at the label.
This week’s effect has been far more dramatic for several reasons. The positive reaction to her Alexander McQueen wedding dress has sent the duchess’s fashion stock soaring. The connection with the Obamas, combined with the afterglow of the royal wedding, ensured that this week’s photograph was widely broadcast on American media, as well as in Britain. And while the Nanette dress had been bought several months earlier and was no longer available when the engagement photos were released, the Shola dress was still available in stores and on the website when the Duchess wore it this week.
“Kate is the most watchable woman in the world right now,” Reiss said. “We’ve had celebrities wearing our clothes before – Beyoncé wore our leather jacket when she came to London – but nobody else has had an effect like this.
“The royal family is held in respect throughout the world, but [until Kate] there had been no one since Diana who had really won the public’s affection. And this week there was the added association with the first lady, which is huge for us in terms of an American audience.”
The duchess has shown a preference for the more upmarket end of high street fashion. In the second of her engagement photos she wore a £95 cream blouse by Whistles. This has been welcomed by the fashion industry, in which mid-market retailers are often squeezed out of airspace between the attention-grabbing prices of the value sector and the catwalk theatrics of designer fashion.
“When the headlines are about how Kate impresses the world in a £175 dress, that draws people’s attention to the fact that £175 is a good price for a quality product,” said Reiss, who believes “a backlash against cheap fashion” is overdue.
“The middle high street brands are having a hard time in the recession,” agreed Bruton, “so this is a very positive statement, showcasing a well-priced British brand to a global audience. Michelle Obama did something similar for J Crew in the States. Reiss is very much becoming Kate’s fail-safe go-to label. It’s obvious that she feels confident in it.”
While Reiss basks in the spotlight, ripples of the Duchess effect are being felt by other retailers. When a £165 pair of LK Bennett wedges made an appearance on the Buckingham Palace lawn as part of the duchess’s going-away outfit, sales surged.
According to LK Bennett’s brand director, Mark Lukas, there is now “an international waiting list” for the updated Maddox style.
Kate Bostock, executive director of general merchandise at Marks & Spencer, reports that sales of wedge shoes increased by 70% in the days following those going-away photos. In fashion, the newly minted princess is already a force to be reckoned with.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Obama’s stay at the palace
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
During her long reign, the Queen has met a quarter of all American presidents, but few have stayed at Buckingham Palace for a sleepover. But Barack Obama – a man almost young enough to be her grandson, younger than three of her four children – was a guest on Monday night with his wife Michelle. Generations and continents apart in experience and age, they seemed to be getting on like a house on fire.
But how to entertain the nice, polite young man after lunch? Some of us might get out the family album, or the holiday souvenirs. The Queen can go several steps better: laid out in her private gallery in the palace, under the Rubens paintings, for the presidential perusal were notes by George Washington and George III, a letter by Abraham Lincoln and two copies of the original edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not forgetting a 19th-century volume of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, in double elephant-sized folio, one of the most valuable books of the world: if you want to buy it, the going rate at auction is m.
Nothing quite like that in the exchange of gifts: the Queen gave the Obamas leather-bound facsimiles of the presidential letters in the royal collection, with an antique gold-and-red coral brooch for the first lady. In return Obama, evidently learning from the slight hiatus over his trifling gift of DVDs to Gordon Brown, gave the Queen a collection of photographs from her parents’ visit to Washington in 1939 – the first to the US by a reigning British monarch. The duke received a gift perhaps qualifying for the response “you shouldn’t have”: horseshoes, bits and shanks of equipage from the US champion carriage driving team, engraved with the presidential seal. It was probably the thought that counted.
The royal party, fresh from lunch, were clearly in relaxed mood as they entered the gallery, the Queen pointing out the exhibits as an 85-year-old might show off her begonias. “Jane – you explain,” she instructed Lady Jane Roberts, the librarian at Windsor Castle, who had selected the exhibits.
Get any awkwardness out of the way first: a letter from Washington about the surrender of British troops at Yorktown at the end of the war of independence. Beside it, George III’s neatly written note, agonising over the loss of the colonies: “America is lost! Must we fall beneath the blow?” Spirits evidently rising, he concluded perceptively: “A people spread over an immense part of fertile land, industrious because free and rich because industrious, presently becomes a market for the manufactures and commerce of the mother country.” He didn’t add, as one of his negotiators of the peace treaty did, “And everyone of ‘em speaking English.”
“That was just a temporary blip in the relationship,” said Obama, looking down genially.
They made their way slowly round the gallery, the Queen murmuring, “Interesting” at Lady Jane’s commentary, while examining her fingernails. The duke cheerfully turned the pages of the Audubon to show Mrs Obama, ruffling them as if they were a paperback.
There was some chuckling at a letter, written from Washington during the 1939 tour, by the Queen’s mother to “My Darling Lilibet” describing a picnic luncheon: “All our food on one plate – a little salmon, some turkey, some ham, lettuce, beans and HOT DOGS too!”
It was a pity they scarcely had time to glance at the handwritten letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to Queen Victoria in February 1862, in the middle of the civil war, after learning of the death of Prince Albert. He sympathised with his “Great and Good Friend” over the overwhelming affliction that had befallen her: “I would fain have your Majesty apprehend … that real sympathy can exist, as real truthfulness can be practised, in the intercourse of nations…” Three years later Victoria was writing to Lincoln’s widow, following the president’s assassination: “Though a stranger to you, I cannot remain silent when so terrible a calamity has fallen upon you,” and Mary Lincoln was writing back in anguish about “the intense grief I now endure.”
Protocol directs that after a reciprocal banquet at the US ambassador’s residence, the Queen and duke will bid farewell to their guests, who then return to the palace for a further night. Perhaps they will leave the cornflakes out for the morning, with a note for the Obamas to help themselves.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Barack Obama’s UK visit: view from US
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
Tornado-Damaged Missouri Braces for Second Storm, Obama Arrives in London, read Tuesday’s headline on pbs.org, summing up the general attitude of the American media to the presidential tour of Britain: yes, he’s there, but so what? At most, it’s a secondary story, certainly compared to the tornadoes in the midwest and the reverberations still felt from the president’s statements about the Middle East last week.
Needless to say, this has not been the attitude of the British press who have been lavishing praise and front-page coverage on the Obamas. This was never going to be an easy trip for Obama or the US press.
Aside from the distraction of domestic issues, the sheer number of international issues he intends to address on this trip were enough to give most American readers news fatigue. The Obamas’ meeting with Kate and Wills helped to bump the story to more prominence, on TuesdayTuesday as they are still seen as interesting in their own right, whereas Ireland was viewed mainly in relation to stories about other countries, paticularly the Middle East, and Obama’s distant relatives.
The New York Times has been providing daily coverage of the tour, but in an ever-so-slightly sceptical, even reluctant tone, and it has made repeated jibes about the cliche of a US president claiming a distant familial connection in Ireland. (The Daily News, on the other hand, ran towards the Irish cliches with the eagerness of an American searching for his ancestors.) In Tuesday’s New York Times, the Obamas drinking Guinness got a good half-page – but it was deemed two pages less interesting than another story from Europe detailing the noble effort of a little-known “soccer player” to ban internet gossip, a saga that has caused much amusement among American bloggers who are, perhaps, less shocked at the concept of celebrity tittle tattle. But tellingly, Obama’s announcement that he will visit Missouri on Sunday instantly got more play on New York Post’s website than the pictures of him with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a couple heretofore revered above all other by American tabloids. Still they can console themselves with the confirmation that they are, officially, seen as the most interesting royals to Americans: the Queen got a few token references in the press but poor Camilla had to make do with a photo in which she is wholly obscured by the president. One can only be grateful, incidentally, that Jon Stewart is away this week so expat viewers don’t have to endure his impression, again, of the Queen, one that bears closer relation to Dame Edna than Queen Elizabeth.
A final boot in the ribs was the now apparently traditional reminder that Britain and America no longer have a special relationship. It has been downgraded to an “essential relationship” which, at the very least, sounds a lot less romantic.
But whatever changes there may be in that regard, the somewhat uninterested US and the hyperbolic UK coverage of the Obamas’ British jaunt proves that, really, the familial relationship is still the same as it ever was, with Britain as the overexcited younger sibling – and America barely noticing he’s there.
• This article was amended on 25 May 2011. The original said that the Obamas drinking Guinness was deemed less interesting than another UK story. This has been corrected.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Obama to see Americana from Queen’s art collection
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
It is a custom of state visits for the Queen to show the visiting dignitary a specially chosen selection of highlights that may be of interest to them and their nation from her extraordinary collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs and objets d’art.
The Royal Collection is one of the last surviving examples of monarchical collections, which in most countries have long since become part of public museums; from a historical point of view, it is the finest collection in the world, with treasures such as Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings and Holbein’s portrait studies.
Barack Obama will get a personal view of it this afternoon in the picture gallery of Buckingham Palace, where he will see paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Titian. Among these masterpieces, he will see a special “American” display.
This may seem unpromising – after all, the monarchy lost America back in the 18th century – but in fact the Royal Collection has a fascinating haul of Americana in among its Leonardos.
Indeed, this art collection tells of British enthusiasm down the centuries for all things American, offering plenty of material for a presidential private view.
Admittedly, one of the greatest royal collectors was George III, whose reign was marked by British defeat in the revolutionary war and loss of the British empire’s richest colony. And it is true that the collection includes a Tarleton cap, a piece of military headgear named after Banastre Tarleton, who was one of the most hated and feared British officers in the attempt to suppress the revolution. Yet the Queen’s collection reveals that subsequent monarchs soon fell in love with the young republic.
And that really doesn’t seem too strong a description of Queen Victoria’s passion for the wild west. One of the most evocative American images in the Royal Collection is a photograph of Buffalo Bill that she purchased as a souvenir of her favourite frontiersman.
It shows the famous hunter and scout posing with his rifle, long hair and cowboy hat, and wearing a leather tunic in the style of a Plains Indian. It was taken in 1892, the year the Queen enjoyed a special performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at Windsor Castle. This was the second time she had seen the show. She praised Buffalo Bill, real name William Cody, as “a splendid man, handsome and gentlemanlike”.
She also commissioned Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1839 painting Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals, a richly oiled canvas of a man lying calmly among wild beasts, after she watched this American lion tamer perform on seven occasions that year. Queen Victoria had a special relationship with American tough guys, it would seem from her art collecting.
You can chart the cultural history of two continents from this venerable art collection. The Royal Collection dates back to the age when, in European eyes, much of North America was untamed wilderness. Some of the oldest images of America that it holds depict exotic flora and fauna of the new world, such as Mark Catesby’s picture of an American bison, looking like a survivor of the Ice Age, dating from the early 18th century.
America in the early 1700s was above all seen as a natural sphere of study, a new world to catalogue, in the eyes of the Royal Collection, which also includes Catesby’s studies of a skunk and a bald eagle. But by the 1770s, America was producing its own artists. George III appointed the Pennsylvania-born Benjamin West as history painter to the court; West’s 1771 masterpiece The Death of General Wolfe is one of the highlights of the Royal Collection. He in turn persuaded the King to make use of a fellow American, John Singleton Copley, to portray the Hanoverian princesses.
So the years that saw the American Revolution also saw American artists working directly for the monarchy, for the simple reason that an art scene did not yet exist as such in Boston or New York. Soon, though, American culture would become proudly self-conscious, and the flora and fauna once studied as objects of curiosity by Europeans would be rediscovered by American romantics as the essence of a new nationhood.
Another photograph collected by Queen Victoria is a portrait of the poet Henry Longfellow, seen in his day as the great national American bard, by Julia Margaret Cameron. Longfellow’s 19th-century epic poem Hiawatha draws on Native American myth to imagine the continent in its innocence, as a place where humanity lived in accord with nature. Queen Victoria apparently loved Hiawatha as well as Buffalo Bil, if her purchase of this photo is anything to go by.
In the Royal Collection, there is plenty to fascinate American eyes. It offers a romantic vision of the new world, cultivated by rulers and former rulers who dreamed of it from afar.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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