The Wallis Simpson Effect

In December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne so that he could marry Wallis Simpson, an American who had been divorced once and was in the process of divorcing her second husband. The abdication crisis was one of the great scandals of the century, and it made Wallis Simpson one of the most talked-about women in the world. It also made her one of its most closely watched dressers.

Her style was very different from Hollywood glamour. She was slim, angular, and famously immaculate, and she favoured simple, beautifully cut clothes in plain colours, with bold jewellery as her main decoration. She was a loyal client of Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress for her marriage to the Duke of Windsor in June 1937: a long, slim gown in pale blue silk crepe with a close-fitting, nipped-in bodice, worn with a halo hat by Caroline Reboux and gloves in the same crepe. The colour became known as "Wallis blue," and copies of the dress were sold widely almost immediately. She gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 - where, sadly, the unstable dye has since faded almost to cream. She also wore Elsa Schiaparelli, and was photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in Schiaparelli's lobster dress shortly before the wedding.

I think Wallis Simpson is interesting as a style influence precisely because she wasn't beautiful in the conventional Hollywood way, and she knew it. Her look was about control, polish, and thinness - the line "you can never be too rich or too thin" is often attributed to her - and it pointed toward a kind of lean, disciplined, groomed elegance that shaped high fashion for years. It's worth remembering, too, that her reputation is far from simple: the couple's closeness to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, including a 1937 visit where they met Hitler, has rightly overshadowed much of her legacy.