Sir Hardy Amies

Traditionalist couturier who was dressmaker to the Queen for half a century

Edwin Hardy Amies, couturier: born London 17 July 1909; director, Hardy Amies Ltd 1946-2003, president 1996-2003; Chairman, Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers 1959-60; RDI 1964; CVO 1977, KCVO 1989; died Langford, Gloucestershire 5 March 2003.

Hardy Amies was the man who re-designed the bowler hat. He is best known as London's most successful couturier who set out to dress "the English lady with her roots in the country and her playground in town". From his elegant Georgian premises in Savile Row, the home of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he distilled and crafted the quintessentially English gentlewoman's look: tweeds by day and jewel-framing silks by night. It was a virtually immutable style that he honed over six working decades and which became a shibboleth of British upper-class dressing.

Amies was untypical of his profession, being neither an innovator nor a neophiliac. Instead he fused the silhouettes and moods of fashion with the sartorial requirements of court attire and dressed a breed of Englishwoman who regarded high fashion as the height of vulgarity. British Vogue once asked him what he thought his contribution was to fashion. "I think that I kept the court dressmaking tradition alive, while introducing modern fashion to women of all ages and status," he replied.

As a young fashion historian at Vogue I used to scuttle round the corner to see Sir Hardy in Savile Row and listen to his informed views on the history of fashion and acidic observations on good and bad taste. Unlike many fashion designers who came across as uneducated dullards when discussing their profession, Amies would dissect the social, political and economic influences that gave rise to a particular style of dress. He understood that a sense of fashion combined with historical revivals influenced all the decorative arts.

"When I first came to London," he explained,

the modern style was Regency revival. I realised that one must understand period things in order to be able to adapt them to the age, so I had to learn about the Regency. You have to understand the mores and the reasonings behind the design of a period.

It was a working method that served him well and was especially pertinent to his royal custom.

The British royal family were the pinnacle of Amies's prestigious and discerning list of clients. He began designing for the Queen when, as Princess Elizabeth, she made a State Visit to Canada in 1950. When she succeeded to the throne he was awarded the Royal Warrant in 1955. Being a traditionalist with a wide knowledge of history, particularly the genealogy of European royal families, and a master of tactful charm, he was well suited to the task. Furthermore, he appreciated that the royal image should be conservative, consistent and above all appropriate for the Queen's peripatetic duties. His special appeal was his ability to provide "that rarest gift to beauty, common sense", for the Royal Family have always favoured comfort and propriety over showmanship.

He quickly grasped that there was little point in proposing "fashion" to the Queen: she simply wasn't interested. And while many criticised her extraordinary outfits – stiff coats and matching dresses in bon-bon colours teamed with small, oddly bowed hats, white patent shoes and matching bag – he understood her requirements. Woe betide the person who criticised Ma'am's dress. "The Queen best knows what she should wear," her dressmaker would retort snootily. His clothes for the Queen succeeded because they turned her into an inimitable icon; there's no one else in the world who dresses like her. Even the canniest marketing guru would acknowledge that it is a triumph of branding.

Hardy Amies was full of antechamber stories about royal dressing that he was aching to tell but, for propriety's sake, held his tongue. One did slip. On one occasion, the Queen, clearly pleased with his efforts, stood in front of her mirror admiring a new woollen dress. She instructed her ladies' maid to fetch a fur coat and, studying her reflection, she turned to Amies and said, "Very good. If only someone would ask us somewhere smart."

Her Majesty and Sir Hardy struck up a warm rapport and his humour ensured her patronage. The Queen may not have roared with laughter at her dressmaker's quips but we have reason to believe that she was mildly amused.

Born in London, in Maida Vale, and brought up in the suburbs, the son of a modest civil servant and a court dressmaker, the young Hardy was educated at a minor public school, Brentwood (he later redesigned their uniform). He then travelled through France and Germany, taking odd jobs and mastering both languages. In 1930 he returned to England as the travelling representative of the Avery Weighing Machine Company. It is significant that he did not train in the arts, as most dress designers do, but in commerce. This was to stand him in good stead; financial realism tempered his designs and his guiding adage was "A dress is just a fantasy on paper until it is sold".

Owing to an amusingly observant description of a dress that he wrote in a letter, Amies was asked to join the house of Lachasse (the name is the French translation for the hunt) where his mother worked in 1934. He was deemed to have good taste. Trained under Digby Morton, he was soon promoted to chief designer and developed a reputation for being a skilled tailor and a modest dressmaker, boasting that he could "design tweed suits standing on my head!" This nattily dressed and handsome young couturier quickly won noble custom due to a burning ambition, competence in tailoring and a warm, safely mischievous personality.

During the Second World War Amies made use of his languages by serving as liaison officer to the British and Belgian armies in Brussels in an intelligence unit. Bringing his popinjay taste into the militia he insisted on cutting his own uniform using Loden rather than khaki – "so much chic-er, that green rather than beige, don't you agree?" He would periodically return to London to contribute designs for the Government Utility Scheme, in order to raise desperately needed foreign currency by designing collections for export to the Americas and to work with the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, the governing body of the couture.

In 2000 the news broke that Amies had organised assassinations of Nazis and Nazi sympathisers during the war. In January 1944 he had co-ordinated Operation Ratweek, SOE's assassination of senior Nazis across Western Europe on the eve of D-Day. It was typical of Amies's patriotism and self- confidence that he did not feel the need to brag about his war record.

Hardy Amies couture was opened in 1945. Quick to court the American buyers, he encouraged them to order toiles and suits to copy in their department store. Numerous licence deals followed and Amies developed the most lucrative licensing empire of all the British fashion houses. He mass-marketed menswear throughout America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, a range of workwear, cosmetics, lingerie, two couture and ready-to-wear lines each year and even a range of HA lavatory brushes. By 1993 his annual turnover exceeded £250m.

Hardy Amies was never at the cutting edge of fashion, but experience and taste enabled him to retain his position. Neil "Bunny" Roger, a friend and waspish rival, placed him in context when he opined, "He's not a frightfully good designer but he does have good taste. He doesn't make mistakes." Amies designed clothes that wouldn't frighten the horses and since many were destined to be worn at Ascot or Cheltenham that was just as well.

His ladies hated what Amies referred to sniffily as "tombé mort clothes". "To knock people between the eyes with your dress is frightfully naff," he would admonish, adding, "That was the Duchess of Windsor's mistake." Clothes were not designed to flaunt your wealth – "frightfully American" – and, as for appearing in the front row of dress shows, "Debo Devonshire [the Duchess of Devonshire, a client] would no more sit at a public dress show than fly – that's far too common."

He loved issuing dress diktats and, just as you were about to dismiss him as impossibly pompous, that smile beamed down at you, the head rolled back and the machine-gun rat-a-tat of laughter began. Nostrils held comically high he would begin:

Right. Let's start with the three great rules of dress. Clothes should not be too tight – why do fat women insist on straining their thighs through the cloth? Clothes should suit the occasion. You should not try too hard with your dress or look dominated by it. It should serve you, dear girl. Got it? Right, now, keep it simple, for only simple tailoring shows itself off.

"What's the point," he would say with a final flourish, "of fucking up the cloth with a whole load of seams, huh?" He loved to pepper his talk with the bawdy Anglo-Saxonisms favoured by English nobs.

Hardy Amies was the perfect advertisement for self-improvement, a trait that he was proud of and passed on to both his boyfriends and staff. His appreciation of what was considered "comme il faut" in society was garnered after close scrutiny of upper class life and he moulded himself into an MGM depiction of an urbane and educated English gent. "Hardy worked terrifically hard at it, made it a bit of a chore," teased Bunny Roger, probably because he was fortunate in being born the other side of the tracks.

But Amies believed that

taste is 70 per cent education and experience. I will give you an anecdote which I think proves the point. I had just laid a bed of tulips in the country and invited John Fowler [of Colefax & Fowler] down to admire them. "They're hideous!" opined Fowler. "Have you ever seen 17th-century striped clusiana tulips? Now they're beautiful." As I had never come across them I could not compare.

You see, it was a matter of education, and I was ignorant. If you've never seen an old-fashioned rose then you're going to think that Whisky Mac is heaven, aren't you!

He spent many weekends down at his Cotswolds retreat, a 17th- century schoolhouse, which he referred to knowingly as "almost a gentleman's abode". There he tended his roses, played endless tennis, mastered needlepoint, read history, wrote book reviews and entertained friends. One such friend, Peter Coats, the late and renowned gardener and socialite, remembered:

We would amuse ourselves by setting each other problems on the finer points of history, for Hardy is a keen historian. He might not know the exact details of the Treaty of Utrecht but he could certainly list the legitimate and illegitimate children of King Louis XIV, or tell you all there was to know about the Electress Sophie.

If there was one person who grounded Hardy Amies it was his devoted, spinster sister Rosemary (who died in 2001). She ran his life and told it to him straight. When her brother went too far she would administer a kindly reprimand. They were inseparable. He was fiercely loyal and generous to his staff too. The "family" consisted of Ken Fleetwood, the design director, who worked with him for 44 years, Roger Whiteman, head of the lucrative licensing business and Jon Moore, who succeeded Fleetwood when he died in 1996. In turn, Jacques Azagury and the former Bally designer, Paolo Gabrielli, succeeded as designer-in-chief of the house. With typical largesse, Amies left his fashion house in trust to his staff and the business was sold in May 2001 to the Luxury Brands Group, headed by David Duncan Smith, brother of the Conservative Party leader.

Indoors his taste was far from typical of the average frockmaker, for he preferred a masculine, robust and honest setting of William and Mary furniture in the country – "they made domesticity elegant", he believed – and Regency style and upholstery in town.

Even in his seventies and eighties he came across as a jaunty and energetic man. He considered that

it is not possible to lead a stylish life without playing some sort of sport. The clue to good style and appearance is health. When you are designing clothes you are always aiming at an ideal, and the ideal man is a banker who plays tennis.

Heeding his own words he would play six sets of tennis a weekend with house guests well into his seventies and attended Wimbledon annually.

When the Queen suffered her annus horribilis in 1992 Amies could boast,

Do you realise, dear girl, that this has been my annus mirabilis? More frocks and suits sold than in any other year. Not bad for an 83-year old! Most people think that you're dead in fashion after 32 years of age. Huh! I'll show 'em.

Right until the end of his life Hardy Amies was starry-eyed about his good fortune and his well- appointed life style; that was part of his charm. Sometimes it went to his head, but this was a human and endearing failing. His long-standing chum, "nanny" and PR, Peter Hope-Lumley, often chastised him for being too mean and too grand. On one occasion Amies retorted, "Well, mean because I have no money, and grand because I've got something to be grand about, dear boy. I dress the Queen of England!"

In the end, Hardy Amies believed that the best way to judge a couturier was to select his 10 fattest customers and see what he'd done for them. As he flattered and retained the custom of some of the grandest and fattest ladies in the land, even by his own exacting standards, he passed with flying colours.

Jane Mulvagh