‘Dress sense of a queen’: Cecil Beaton’s queering of Britain’s royal past

Abstract

The origins of camp can be traced by exploring the ways in which the past was queered during the inter-war period. Cecil Beaton was establishing himself as one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. He and many of his friends were fascinated by the styles of the period before 1914. That interest extended to cross-dressing and the construction of photographic collages that ironically juxtaposed the fashions of the past and the present. The effect of this was to make the dresses and aristocratic social mores of the fin de siècle appear amusingly excessive. In the process the image of royalty was reinvented through travesty and social life in Britain was invested with queer opportunity.