She’s the frontline NHS worker who has made the front pages; the woman who still lives where she grew up but has just moved into the world’s most famous address. Now Victoria Starmer looks set to take up the unelected — and unenviable — ceremonial role of the nation’s most scrutinised clothes horse too.
As this paper’s fashion editor, my beat has covered the Kate effect and Meghan merch, pivoted from Mobama-rama to Melania mania, and more recently the Swift economy. This past week, however, a new retail phenomenon has swept the shops: a wealth-creating, growth-producing landslide of sorts for the brands involved. I suspect she’s cringing at the very thought of it, but so far everything Victoria Starmer wears is selling out left, right and centre.
Tuesday evening’s cream Needle & Thread dress for the flight to Washington? Snapped up. The pleated red Kooples gown on the White House balcony? Only one size left. On the website of Me+Em — the British brand she wore both on election night and arriving at Downing Street after Labour’s win — captions below both the white jacket and red mididress in question coyly state “this style is a customer favourite this week”.
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Well, so is Vic — and for the same reason her silver Russell & Bromley kitten heels are now low in stock across the board too: like them, she looks glamorous but comfortable. Fun on a night out but won’t chafe. Accessible. In social media parlance, “relatable”, and yes I am talking more about her than the shoes at this point.
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To me — also a working mother of two who lives in a part of London that is rapidly shedding its hardware stores and pound shops for craft ale and sourdough artisans — Vic Starmer feels familiar but impressive, recognisable but stealthily code-breaking too. She has a meaningful and demanding job; her kids go to a state secondary; and the Starmers’ is clearly a strong, happy marriage in which both parties like each other and laugh together. As has so often been revealed, none of these things is a given when your husband is a barrister turned politician. The Sunaks may have discussed emptying the dishwasher together in an interview for Grazia, but nobody ever actually believed they did. Meanwhile, Carrie and Boris Johnson’s relationship seemed to be based on using the country and its fortunes as some kind of prop. One imagines if not Richard Curtis levels of badinage in the Starmer household then sub-par rom-com teasing at least.
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Do I want to dress like Vic Starmer? That’s tricky because the wifely midis, while perfect for the camera-ready hand she must now play, are not particularly cool. I rather prefer the glimpses we have had of her in non-stateswoman capacity: a bright yellow fake fur French Connection jacket, leather leggings and the Whistles tasselled waistcoat she wore to watch Taylor Swift all speak of someone with a bit more edge. There’s something of that early Noughties Primrose Hill rock chick look in the mix, as invented by Kate Moss just down the road from the Starmers’ neighbourhood — if Kate Moss were doing the school pick-up, that is.
Of course, the sensible politician’s wife wardrobe looks a little staid by comparison. However, as Starmer’s choice of a red Edeline Lee gown (designed and made in Limehouse), of the same style worn in teal by the Princess of Wales, proved at last year’s Labour conference in October, her instinct errs towards London cool even in classic mode.
The fashion industry is buzzing with whether Starmer has a stylist or not — she shops directly from some of the labels she has been seen in but not at others, suggesting there might be a stylist (or friend) ordering for her. Crucially, though, she doesn’t look like she has one. She has already planted her flag precisely where most politicians are desperate to land and rarely do: the normal side of aspirational.
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Witness the non-salon blow-dry that swerves both the usual elite-tier helmet (see Penny Mordaunt during the debates) and the only other public-facing option of mermaid waves. In these straitened times, the most stylish women know that looking like someone else did your hair is no longer cool. I suspect Starmer has in her arsenal the low-key power dressers’ secret weapon: the Dyson Supersonic, whose life-changing, hook-shaped, frizz-busting attachment I refer to at home as the “Abu Hamza” but I imagine the Starmers do not.
Again, all this is quietly revolutionary. Look at a screen of any size for long enough and it is easy to forget what women in real life actually look like. From influencers to newsreaders, hair, eyelash and nail extensions are now par for the course, as are veneers, fillers and Botox. Starmer’s natural-looking, non-contoured make-up and “I shaped these irrevocably in the Noughties” eyebrows are of a sort one sees all the time in the street but only rarely in our digital lives where leaders tend to appear, smoothed and airbrushed. As for tweakments, that’s her business, but my hunch is not, and for the same reason I haven’t: because I don’t want my daughter to think she has to.
If I were staring down the same sartorial gauntlet that Starmer must have as those polls refused to budge an inch and the world’s media beckoned, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Bright colours and fitted waists work in photos; so too do shoes you can walk in. I’m nit-picking, but were I to her what Isabel Spearman was to the Camerons — an image consultant — I might have mentioned that while she looked absolutely banging in that broderie dress, wearing cream next to a man in a suit always looks a bit wedding-y. Then again, what is this latest trip to DC if not the absolute definition of a honeymoon, politically speaking?
Besides, the newly crowned Queen Vic is bringing a certain amount of real-world style to the global stage: dressing still very much in the vein of stylish wedding guest, rather than in royals territory, or indeed like one of the wives from The Handmaid’s Tale, in a dress that perfectly matches shoes, hat, bag and coat. Should this be her fate in future, Vic is lucky too that she suits red.
