Over the course of her 63 years on the British throne, established a wealth of traditions still upheld by the royal family today, from summering at Balmoral (Prince Albert purchased the castle for his wife in 1853) to erecting Christmas trees come advent each year (although the late Queen preferred to celebrate the holiday at Osborne on the Isle of Wight rather than in Norfolk or Windsor). One of Victoria’s more peculiar legacies, however? A royal affinity for nautical-inspired dress. The Queen first commissioned a miniature sailor’s uniform for her eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, in 1846, intending for the four-year-old to wear it aboard the royal yacht while sailing around the Channel Islands.
“[It was] beautifully made by the man on board who makes for our sailors,” the monarch later wrote in her diary, noting that “the officers and sailors who were all assembled on deck to see him, cheered, and seemed delighted.” No one, however, was as taken with the look as Prince Albert, who commissioned a portrait of his son wearing the suit by German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter as a Christmas gift to Victoria. When the royal family exhibited the picture of the future King Edward VII in St James’s Palace the following year, more than 100,000 visitors came to see it, with prints and miniatures circulated widely among the public—kickstarting a Victorian craze for nautical children’s fashion that spread through the British aristocracy and beyond.
The trend continu.
