Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, has died at home in Balmoral in Scotland, aged 96, surrounded by her children, including her eldest son, now King Charles III.
Vogue – September 8, 2022
Through the 70 years of her reign, years of devoted service to her country and the Commonwealth and its peoples, the queen has been globally revered and widely beloved as she weathered a roiling century and some personal storms with enduring equanimity and grace. She witnessed history being made and was a part of it. Her knowledge of world events, politics, and power structures was nonpareil. Known to us all as a symbol of stability, she was at once a figure so potent that she visited her subjects in our dreams and was perceived as an extended part of our families but nevertheless guarded her inner world with the strength of the monarchs who built Britain, remaining in many ways inscrutable to the end.
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary (carefully named for one distinguished British monarch, her devoted grandmother, and her great-grandmother Queen Alexandra) made her formal debut in Vogue in the issue published August 15, 1927, flashing a beaming smile for the society photographer Marcus Adams and even coaxing one from her grandmother Queen Mary, George V’s consort, who firmly counseled that smiling in public was unregal and upon whose knee she sat.