QUEEN Letizia presided an International Red Cross and Red Crescent Day event at Valencia's Oceanogràfic marine life centre this week – wearing a dress retailed by a local shop for just €64.
She presented gold medals for outstanding community work in the name of the global organisation, and gave a speech highlighting the crucial work carried out by the Red Cross and Red Crescent salaried employees and volunteers, saving lives and helping out the most vulnerable members of society in their home countries and overseas.
Queen Letizia with organisation workers on International Red Cross and Red Crescent Day at Valencia's Oceanogràfic (photo: CAC/Red Cross)
In 2021 alone, the organisation attended to nearly 15 million people, providing everything from local ambulance and beach lifeguard services, food parcels and first-aid training through to crisis relief in war zones and natural disaster areas, and medical attention to would-be migrants rescued from the sea.
Queen Letizia declared that the Red Cross and its Islamic-origin 'sister', the Red Crescent, were a 'reflection' of 'the good that human beings are able to offer'.
She was given a guided tour of the Oceanogràfic, Europe's largest aquarium, based at the spectacular and futuristic City of Arts and Sciences (Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, or CAC), where the 45,000-plus marine creatures live in replica real-life habitats, so that they are not aware they are in 'captivity'.
Valencia's Oceanogràfic is the western Mediterranean's key marine veterinary hospital, treating sick, injured and trapped turtles and dolphins rescued off the region's shores, nursing them back to full health and releasing them into the wild again.
HRH Letizia's dress received considerable coverage and commentary due to its bright and beautiful colour – fuchsia – and design which, at first glance, appears demure and classical, but with a youthful twist in the form of cut-out side panels and a large ring attached to the bodice and skirt.
And the dress was clearly a nod to the territory she was attending the event in, given that it is a creation retailed by Valencia-based chain Serendipia, for the Sevilla label Cayro.
It was bought from a boutique in the nearby town of Torrent – officially at the dead centre of the east coast region of the Comunidad Valenciana – and retails at €64.
Queen Letizia combined it with a leather handbag and low-heeled animal-print court shoes, both in the same shade of fuchsia and by another of her favourite brands, the Venezuelan designer Carolina Herrera.
Royal fashion icon
Wife of King Felipe VI of Spain and holder of the title of Queen in her own right, through her marriage, HRH Letizia – a former journalist and TV reporter who has worked for multi-national channels in Spain, the USA and México – makes the headlines just as often for her outfits as for her ambassador work.
Almost the minute Queen Letizia is photographed wearing a given item, it sells out, whether she paid €3,000 or €15 for it.
Usually, the Queen's costumes at the lower end of the price range and from high-street stores are the first ones to vanish from the shelves and online – and, of course, their value automatically soars beyond what they retail at, purely because of their famous wearer.
In fact, they could almost be considered an investment or an heirloom – in the same way as the UK's Duchess of Cambridge's 'Shola' dress from high-street chain Reiss, worn on an official visit to the then US First Lady Michele Obama, was fetching a minimum of double the retail price on eBay, second-hand, even more than a year after the photos were released.
HRH Letizia's dress cost €64 from Serendipia in Torrent, near Valencia, and is by design house Cayro (photo: CAC/Red Cross)
HRH Letizia is a huge fan of Spain's famous Inditex brands, especially the mid-upper high-street labels Massimo Dutti and Uterqüe and cut-price young fashions chain Zara.
Back in October 2018, she was photographed at the Princess of Asturias Awards, named for her daughter Leonor, wearing a tie-waisted chequered tunic top from Zara selling at just €26, every last one of which had been bought from stores nationwide by the next day and online stocks, other than in size XS, cleared out.
The following year, she went completely the other way, attending the ceremony in a peach-coloured satin strapless top adorned with feathers and a pair of slimline black trousers, both by The 2nd Skin Co and costing €680 and €550 respectively.
Publishing house Delirio ended up working around the clock after summer 2015 when orders for their €15 T-shirt with German-Czech author Franz Kafka's name as a logo, designed by Eduardo Scala, went off the scale – just because Letizia had been pictured wearing it on holiday in Mallorca.
Even Queen Letizia's daughters, Princess Leonor, 16 and the Infanta Sofía, 15 – whose ageless style suited them just fine in earliest primary school, still works beautifully for them now and looks good on women of their mother's generation – have triggered sales spikes at Zara, Adolfo Domínguez and El Corte Inglés' own brand Sfera with their outfits.
All three Royal females are often pictured in the same outfit several times at key events, showing that they do not contribute to the planet-harming 'fast fashion' trend by throwing garments away once they have been seen in public, and the girls have been known to borrow shoes and coats from their mum for public engagements.
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