Today’s King Charles can be seen close to the ground with his chickens (a fox will later kill 40 animals). Princess Margaret, 21, in a wedding dress of sorts by Dior (two years later her affair with the royal equerry is revealed, marriage impossible). And Peter Blake painted Elizabeth, the Queen grandmotherly in candy pink.
If you want to learn something about monarchy, you can take the new book “Royals” to hand. It shows – Attention, royalists! – Glossy images of the British royal family Vogue while also illustrating how the royal family has cemented its power over the decades and scandals.
Josephine Ross and Robert Murir: Royals – Images of the Royal Family from British Vogue: A Photographic History of the Windsors. Prestel, Munich 2022. 304 pages. 38 euros.
(Photo: Prestel Verlag)
In the pictures, remoteness and affection are well dosed, the insignia of power finely tuned to the spirit of their time – from the golden scepter to the supposedly permanently repaired Savile Row suit, from saintly beauty to classy sex appeal. Anyone who doesn’t fit in with all of this doesn’t take place (Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, for example, the Queen’s mentally handicapped cousins). This is not just how images are created, this is how domination is created.