Designer’s Notebook

‘Volcanic temper… suspicious of everyone… irritability, mood swings… terror stalking the shadows… devastating collapse of Europe’s economy… rampant insecurity, unbridled hypochondria…’ Trump? No, it’s Henry VIII, according to Robert Hutchinson. But the ‘king’ across the water is uncannily like the Tudor tyrant; the discarded wives, the wenching, the rival heirs, the fawning, the flattery, the broken treaties. Palm Beach is his jousting ground; Mar-a-Lago his gaudier Nonsuch.

As I was writing a review of the very wordy Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes by Shahidha Bari, who believes that every stitch we put on has some deep inner meaning, up she pops on a radio programme to say that fashion has never been as diversified as now. What? Has she not looked around? Though the denim tide is gradually receding, its ubiquity has been replaced by every male, even the more mature, shuffling about in sloppy shorts: the young live in trackies, and all women wear trainers. In the past the streets were vibrant with variation: uniforms, civil and military, the latter deemed unsafe. You now see very few nuns and priests, bowlered City gents, tycoonesses in power-shoulders, neat old ladies or rampant dandies. The police are indistinctive in yellow hi-vis; there’s a dearth of skinheads, Teds, meter-maids in stern skirts and bike-messengers in leathers. Remember how their wind-blown locks would curl round their helmets like Mercury’s wings?

Frogmore House, lying in its lush 18th-century landscape below Windsor’s castle, couldn’t be a more sylvan setting for post-wedding receptions. At a recent one I went to, as younger royals sunk gratefully into chairs, the Queen stood for more than 45 minutes, listening to each speech, mentally annotating every word, and left with no ceremony. Nearby, hidden artlessly in a grove of trees, nestles Frogmore Cottage, seemingly a modest two-up, two-down job; but it also has a long, clearly newly renovated, wing.