One of the things that we don’t always talk about with the Royal Family is how difficult it is to stand out among the pack. On their own, most royals have a chance to be the fanciest person in the room. But if that room is full of royals, all equally wealthy and glamorous, it can be difficult to stand out unless you have a defined personal style.
Fortunately for Rose Hanbury, she had a great sense of style long before she married into the Royal Family. That marriage ended up changing her look in some dramatic ways, but her fashion sense is still dramatically different from the rest of the royals. Don’t believe it? Keep reading to discover how marriage has completely changed Rose Hanbury’s fashion!
Rose Hanbury’s unconventional rise to fame
Remember when we said that Rose Hanbury was stylish before becoming a royal? In her case, being stylish was actually her job. That’s because she became a model at the tender age of 23, but relatively little is known about her runway career.
We do know that her modeling career was super-charged by a brush with celebrity. When she went on a family vacation to Italy, she ran into Tony Blair. He was still Prime Minister back then, and the photo of Hanbury next to him in her pink bikini went viral. She then signed up with Storm Models, though her her marriage to royalty put her modeling days firmly in the rearview mirror.
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Meeting Mr. Right
It’s fair to say that major things happen when Rose Hanbury goes to Italy. Two years before that Italian trip where she met Tony Blair (the one that effectively led to her modeling career), she met her future husband David Rocksavage in 2003. The two of them wouldn’t get married until 2009, but it seems like she was always destined to catch Rocksavage’s eye.
If you didn’t already know, Rocksavage had a reputation for dating and otherwise hanging around with supermodels. A great example of this is that famous model Kate Moss is one of his very best friends. Of course, an irony of Rocksavage marrying Hanbury is that her supermodel fashion caught his eye, but marrying into the Royal Family would forever change her style.
How did Rose Hanbury dress before marriage?
Before we can dive into how marrying into the Royal Family changed Hanbury’s style, we need to review how she once dressed. In short, she had a breezy but stylish look where she would put belts over dresses whether they were necessary or not and sported denim jackets over minidresses, the look of the true fashionista on the go.
If Rose Hanbury has any major fashion secrets, they are likely in the giant handbags that she used to wear. As great as she looked in photos from back then, it’s clear those styles were never going to fly with the royals. After getting married, Hanbury ended up dramatically changing her personal style.
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Dressing like a fairytale princess
Now you know how Rose Hanbury dressed in her supermodel days…the kinds of looks that initially turned David Rocksavage’s head. Once these two got married, though, how did Hanbury’s fashion sense change?
In short, she traded in her old beautiful and breezy look for an elegant and ethereal one. When she dons floral evening gowns and silky white dresses, she looks like a fairytale princess. That look might be intentional or it might just be her personal sense of style, but it helped her to stand apart among the rest of her new Royal Family.
A fashion clash at Prince Philip’s service
For the most part, Rose Hanbury has done a great job of riding the line with the Royal Family. She made fashion choices that helped her blend in with the world’s most famous family even while establishing a personal aesthetic. However, there were times that she managed to clash a little too much with the royals around her, causing a minor stir around the world.
A great example of this is when Hanbury attended Prince Phillip’s service of thanksgiving in 2022. She arguably went a bit too far with her signature quirky look, and the combination of coat dress and pillbox hat was a bit too much. Even her biggest fans had to admit that she looked severely out of place in every single photo from this major event.
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Rose Hanbury doesn’t fit in even when she tries
One of the sad ironies of Rose Hanbury’s life is that even when she tries to play ball with the Royal Family’s preferred fashions, she still stands out, and not always in a good way. For example, in 2020, she attended the first service of the year at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene. This was the perfect time to channel her supermodel days and wear something that blew everyone away.
What she chose did blow, but not in a good way. Hanbury wore a combination of coat, hat, and fur scarf that made her look a bit more like a fairytale villain than a princess. It didn’t help that she looked annoyed and unhappy in most of these photos even as the different outfit components collectively made her look older than usual.