Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (2024)

The Me+Em fit-and-flare dress cost £275, a price point widely acknowledged in the fashion industry as a middle-class sweet spot

Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (1)

The real election winner has been Me+Em. Never mind wide but shallow support. The extremely successful, independent British brand, with 11 UK stores and two more recently opened in New York City, was founded in 2009, in the dying days of the last Labour government, by Clare Hornby and Emma Howarth.

Over the past 24 hours, it has won 100 per cent approval from Lady Starmer, who wore a £295 cream short sleeve single breasted jacket from the spring collection to the count last night, followed up with a £275 red (of course) fit-and-flare dress from the brand’s latest “drop”, and a pair of £295 silver slingbacks from Russell and Bromley, also a UK stalwart brand, to walk into Downing Street with her husband on Friday lunchtime.

Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (2)

So many key questions spring forth – ones you probably won’t find Laura Kuenssberg and her colleagues addressing. Is £295 henceforth a new Labour fiscal policy? It has been widely acknowledged in the fashion industry as a middle-class sweet spot – i.e., high enough to make an item seem reassuringly aspirational, but not obscenely so.

Also, is anyone styling, guiding or otherwise personal shopping for Lady Starmer, who, ever since we have seen her in public, has not put a sartorial foot wrong?

It is never easy dressing for a life of public scrutiny as a woman. When you are as private as Victoria Starmer, determined not to drown in her husband’s wake, it is doubly so. The former solicitor, as we all know, is an occupational health worker for the NHS and has two teenage children, who in accordance with their wishes, did not accompany their parents on their progress up the famous street.

Also, to judge from all the glad-handing and air-kissing that went on between her and the aides outside her new home, she has not been as disengaged from her husband’s career as reports have suggested. So when on Earth does she find time to shop; let alone work out an appropriate approach to public dressing and squeeze in the impressive-but-not-Penny-Mordaunt-scale blow dries that are already becoming a hallmark of her public appearances?

Perhaps she was always naturally stylish. Her strapless wedding dress from 2007 when her future husband was plain old Keir, is a good indicator that this may indeed be the case. It really hasn’t dated.

Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (3)

Vic, as her husband likes to call her, is a dab hand at finding a timeless, on-point outfit and seems too familiar with relatively unknown labels not to have an innate interest in fashion. Take the red cotton pintucked shirt dress she wore to vote yesterday – from Jonathan Simkhai, a New York-born designer who won US Vogue’s fashion fund prize back in 2015 and has a knack for clean, classic, American sportswear.

Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (4)

That dress, in a new, green iteration currently costs £445. Perhaps Lady Starmer bought hers a while ago at around the £295 mark. Perhaps she simply realises that investing a reasonable amount in what she wears is, at this stage in her life, a sensible use of her budget.

Further clues that Lady Starmer enjoys and understands the potential power of clothes: the bead-edged pale pink bias-cut dress she wore to a State banquet at Buckingham Palace in 2022 – fashionably vintage-looking; the sparkly cream number from Needle & Thread, a small British favourite of the Princess of Wales she wore to last week’s Japan State Banquet, and the red, belted Edeline Lee dress she wore to Party Conference last year. Lee, another favourite of the Princess, is a Canadian-born designer who makes every one of her flattering dresses in small batches at her East London studio, thus supporting jobs here and minimising waste.

Victoria Starmer’s Downing Street dress – and her message to the British middle class (2024)

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