The Royal Superstar

Browsing through magazines while waiting in the study of a very popular image consultant and page 3 socialite, I chanced upon a feature in ‘The Economist’ mourning the loss of the iconic Maharani Gayatri Devi, who was once listed by Vogue UK as one of the world’s ten most beautiful women. While her innate sense of style has never failed to captivate me, belonging to an era that iconises Angelina Jolie and Aishwarya Rai, I have always regarded her more as a symbol of quaint charm than as a present day muse. But a certain paragraph in the article on how the princess poured expensive French perfume into the sewer of her prison cell and on further research reading anecdotes of how she used to listen to the BBC on a smuggled radio, and play badminton with prostitutes and pickpockets during her 156 day imprisonment in Tihar jail completely altered my fallacy and had me thinking, ‘here’s a woman who can put just about any modern day cosmo girl to shame with her attitude, spirit and spunk’.
I have always believed that personal style is never about what brands you wear or what jewellery you flaunt, but instead an extension of your inner persona to everything from the clothes you wear to the way you live. And in that sense this woman is indeed one of the most stylish women the world has ever seen. Not just because she chose to drape herself in five yards of airy chiffon at a time when women of regal bearing normally dressed in heavy silk brocade or fine muslin embroidered in gold thread or even because she favoured Baroda pearls over ostentatious jewellery, but simply because her sense of style extended well beyond what she wore into every aspect of her being. She might have learnt from her grandmother that emeralds looked better with pink saris rather than green, observed from her mother not to wear diamond-drop earrings at cocktail parties, but when you read how she left Asia’s largest prison and easily one of it’s worst wafting with intoxicating vapours of French perfume, you know that her sense of style and air of regality is way beyond something that can be cultivated. Never again will yards of chiffon and strings of pearl appear as enthralling