Catherine, Princess of Wales, steps back into the fashion spotlight
Dressed in an olive Victoria Beckham suit and a white silk pussy-bow blouse, Catherine walked with McDowell among mannequins and models wearing the designer's looks inside 180 the Strand, the central London building where the event took place. It was the second time the princess had presented the award, which was created by the British Fashion Council and the British royal family in 2018 to recognize the role London's fashion industry 'plays in society and diplomacy.'
The princess did not give public comments at the ceremony, but McDowell said that their private conversation touched on topics including a shared appreciation for craftsmanship and the designer's efforts to make collections in Britain and offer customers the option to repair or rework old garments.
McDowell added that, as Catherine toured the clothes on display, she took interest in a tailored sleeveless jacket called 'the Wales jacket.'
'She said, 'Why would you call it that?' with a big smile,' McDowell said. 'What a moment, to be sharing jokes with our future queen.'
Catherine's appearance at the event came as she has been stepping up the pace and profile of her public engagements after her cancer diagnosis and treatment last year. In January, she said her cancer was in remission; about a month later, the Sunday Times of London published an article that suggested that Kensington Palace would no longer be disclosing any details of her outfits to the news media.
During the awards ceremony, the princess also met with other young designers who were on hand to showcase their wares, including Conner Ives, an American working in London whose 'Protect the Dolls' T-shirt have spread widely on social media in recent weeks. On Tuesday, Ives was announced as the 2025 winner of the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award, which came with a grant and an industry mentorship.
In past years, the Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design went to designers including Richard Quinn, S.S. Daley and Priya Ahluwalia. It has been presented in the past by other senior royals, including Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III and Princess Anne.
McDowell, whose namesake brand was introduced in 2018, is known for offering made-to-order evening and occasion wear designed in London using recycled textiles and new sustainable materials like sequins made of cellulose. Lady Gaga, Sarah Jessica Parker and Keira Knightley are among the label's notable fans.
Winning the Queen Elizabeth II Award was 'a wonderful pat on the back that provides a game-changing stamp of approval,' McDowell said, as well as an 'acknowledgment that working in a circular way is a way forward.'
'I'd love to make a piece for her,' McDowell added, referring to Catherine. 'It would be a dream come true.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
3 minutes ago
- Mint
Top 10 things to know about Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space mission taking Agra-born Arvi Bahal to edge of space today
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin is preparing to launch historic flight from United States' launch pad today. Ahead of the space mission, its time to know key details about the flight, including time, launch pad and crew members, among others. According to Blue Origin, the space mission will take-off from West Texas launch pad at 7:30 am local time (6:00 PM IST). The 6-member crew onboard the NS-34 flight is scheduled to launch on August 3. Marking 34th space mission for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin New Shepard program, this expedition will be American space technology company's 14th human spaceflight. So far, Blue Origin has successfully sent a total of 70 people beyond the planet's atmosphere with New Shepard program. An Indian-American and adventure enthusiast Arvinder Singh Bahal, famously known as Arvi Bahal, is gearing for the space tourism flight. The space dream for the Agra-born thrill seeker and US-based real estate investor, who is nearing the age of 80, is going to come true soon. Besides Arvinder Singh Bahal, other five crew members onboard the space flight include Gkhan Erdem from Turkey; British philanthropist Lionel Pitchford; meteorologist and Emmy winner from Puerto Rico — Deborah Martorell; entrepreneur JD Russell, who previously flew on NS-28; and Justin Sun, who won the initial New Shepard seat auction in 2021. Welcoming Arvinder Singh Bahal and other crew members on the New Shepard programme, Blue Origin in a post on X wrote, 'Welcome to Astronaut Village, NS-34 Crew!' "The live webcast on launch day will start 30 minutes before liftoff," Blue Origin states. Onboard Blue Origin's NS-31 space mission, that launched on April 14, were New York Times bestselling author, pilot, and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez — Jeff Bezos' newly wedded wife; journalist Gayle King; pop singer Katy Perry; film producer Kerianne Flynn; Entrepreneur and global STEM advocate Aisha Bowe; bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyễn; and CBS Mornings co-host and Oprah Daily editor-at-large Gayle King. The previous NS-33 space mission was launched on June 29.
Scroll.in
33 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
Ram Rahman
Stories written by The true story behind a 'real' photograph of Rani Lakshmibai A seven-year-long forensic search that went from India to England has lessons for the AI age of fabrication. Ram Rahman · 13 minutes ago My encounters with Harold Leventhal, friend of Bob Dylan – and India Photographer Ram Rahman shares photographs and memories of an American music world legend who loved the subcontinent. Ram Rahman · Dec 12, 2020 · 11:30 am
Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Bette Howland, the writer who returned from oblivion
Ten years ago, Brigid Hughes, the founding editor and publisher of the literary magazine and imprint A Public Space, was rummaging through the $1 carton at the Housing Works' Bookstore in New York, when a title caught her attention. It was an old copy of a book with a cryptic name, W-3, by a writer called Bette Howland. Hughes had not heard of her before, though a blurb by none other than that icon of American literature Saul Bellow spoke highly of the writing. As Hughes flipped through the book, her eyes were arrested by a random passage. 'All I knew was this: I couldn't take it anymore, no longer could bear this burden of concealment. Things seemed bad enough without adding extra weight. I wanted to be rid of it all, all of it. I wanted to abandon all this personal history—its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-licked sorrows and prides—to thrust it from me like a manhole cover," she read. 'That's what I had wanted all along, that's what I was trying for when I swallowed those pills—what I hoped to obliterate. That was my real need. It had at last expressed itself, become all powerful." It was impossible not to want to read on. So Hughes bought the copy, raced through the book, and began searching for other works by the writer. It was then that she ran into a roadblock. All the bookstores were unhelpful, so was the internet. Although Howland had published two books apart from W-3—which was a memoir of her time at a mental asylum in Chicago in the 1970s—all of them were out of print. There was no information about the writer either, except that she had won the prestigious Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. Enquiries made to both funding bodies yielded nothing of note. For all purposes, Howland seemed to have vanished, presumed dead. Not one to give up, Hughes persisted with her queries until she traced one Jacob Howland, a professor of philosophy, who turned out to be the author's younger son. From him, she learned that Bette was not only alive—though grievously ill with multiple sclerosis and dementia—but also that he also had a key to a safe deposit box in Tusla, Oklahoma, which contained her papers, letters and unpublished manuscripts. And so, before she died at the age of 80 in 2017, Bette Howland had her 'lost" legacy re-discovered and restored to the world as A Public Place. Later, Pan Macmillan, resurrected her books from the 1970s and 1980s—W-3, Blue in Chicago (1978) and Things to Come and Go (1983)—and made them available to readers nearly 50 years later. I discovered W-3 a few weeks ago while staying with a friend and read it over a heady few days. Like Hughes, I was stung by the shock of this incredible find—a ticking timebomb hidden inside the pages of a slim volume with a salmon-pink cover and a black-and-white photograph of the writer smiling out of it. First published in 1974, W-3 looks back to 1968, when Howland swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills while staying at her mentor, friend and lover Saul Bellow's house. Born in 1937 as Bette Sotonoff, she was married to Howard Howland, a neurobiologist, in 1952. They had two sons—Frank, born in 1958, and Jacob, in 1959. But, by the mid-1960s, the relationship had soured. Soon after, Howland was a divorcée, working two jobs—one as a part-time librarian and the other as an editor at Chicago University Press—and bringing up her children as a single mother. Always stressed about finances and unable to focus on her writing, her one true love, she teetered on the edge, until she could no longer hold on. Books on suicide and its aftermath have a long literary lineage. Tove Ditlevsen's The Faces (1968), Ann Quinn's unfinished novel The Unmapped Country (1973), and Penelope Mortimer's Long Distance (1974) are three notable works by women on the same theme published around the time of Howland's breakdown and hospitalisation. This year, Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li, who wrote the introduction to the re-printed edition of W-3, published Things in Nature Merely Grow, where she grappled with the death of her sons James and Vincent, both, allegedly, by suicide. What makes W-3 stand apart is Howland's unique vantage point as a patient under treatment at the mental health ward of a university hospital. Curiously, for a memoir, there is very little excavation of her inner turmoil and suffering. Rather, Howland takes a reporter-like interest in the idiosyncrasies of the people around her. Be it Trudy, sexually flamboyant and uncontained in her expressions, or Zelda, desperately keen to watch a documentary film on mental asylums, or the teenager Jeffrey, who wants to play basketball with donkeys, she taps into each inhabitant's peculiar voice and persona acutely. 'On W-3 you encountered the terrible force of generalization, and it had to be resisted, the self had to be exerted," she writes, explaining the motivation behind her mission. 'Anything to deny this grim, inner, collective state." To contemporary readers, the language and register of W-3 may feel uncomfortable. Howland's prose is shorn of the usual euphemisms of clinical psychiatry. She writes of an era when it was common to label people as 'mad", have such patients 'drugged to the eyes," put on severely restrictive diets or force feed them, and punished for their 'misbehaviours"—not that such practices have been fully obliterated by evolved medical treatments. Howland's experiences were deeply informed by the dynamics of race and gender in 1970s Chicago. Almost all of W-3 is populated by patients in the grip of severe depression, triggered by addiction, poverty and domestic violence. While black men and women pay a more exacting price than their relatively privileged, more educated, white counterparts, no one is immune to the injustices of the system. As Howland puts it, 'We were naked, undefended to the last, to the psychic undercurrents that circulated so freely among us." This shared sense of vulnerability is what gives the community its cohesive identity—it acts like a shield against the 'outer darkness" of the world before which they are all defenceless. Since Howland's fortuitous re-emergence in the public domain, critics and historians have speculated about the reasons behind her disappearance. Jacob, her son, had spoken about her compulsive perfectionism, the need to revise, edit and, most of the time, not publish her work for the eyes of the wider world. It may be hard to understand her behaviour at a time when personal branding, more than talent, has increasingly become the yardstick for literary success for writers. In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, her relationship with Bellow has been questioned and critiqued (they first met when she was 24 and he was nearing 50), though the older writer's role in supporting her career can't be ignored. Bellow made a strong case for the fellowships that made Howland's writing career possible, published her early work, and sent it out to his network. Most of all, he was one of the key instigators behind the writing of W-3. When Howland was ill and bed-ridden in 1968, Bellow gave her some priceless advice. 'I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your happiness. I do it. Many do," he wrote to her. 'One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs." Half a century later, his words still feel like an antidote to those days when the world feels too much and the only remedy, whether you're a 'writer" or not, is to write your way out of the misery.
