Uniform
The uniform is that of a Dragoon Guards officer of the 1840s. It has a skirted red coat with Garter blue velvet cuffs and facings embroidered with the Tudor royal badge of the portcullis. Helmets with white swan feather plumes are worn when on duty, even in church. Officers wear, in addition, gold aiguillettes, and carry sticks of office - gold for the Captain, silver for the Lieutenant, Standard Bearer and Clerk of the Cheque, and ivory for the Harbinger - which they receive from the Sovereign on appointment. Cavalry swords are worn, and long ceremonial battle-axes, over 300 years old, are carried by all the Gentlemen.
The uniforms are produced by the royal warrant holder Gieves & Hawkes from Savile Row in London.
Read more about this topic: Honourable Corps Of Gentlemen At Arms
Famous quotes containing the word uniform:
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one
The great grey rigid uniform combined
Safety with virtue of the sun.
Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.”
—Thom Gunn (b. 1929)