Frances’s love for Sebastian is constant across his guises, but I especially liked that she is deliberately shown as attracted to both. Lady Crystallia’s dramatic and exuberant personality (she makes her debut swanning across the stage at the Miss Marmalade beauty pageant) evokes, for me, a drag persona. The author has said in an interview that she considers him genderqueer but is open to him representing different things to different readers. At times, he feels himself in his masculine prince garments, but he also feels incomplete without Lady Crystallia and her gowns. Sebastian is, if the summary does not make it clear, heterosexual. Staying with him means losing her design dreams, but leaving means they will lose each other. However, Sebastian’s secret soon traps Frances, too – already known as Sebastian’s seamstress, she can’t claim Lady Crystallia’s garments without raising questions. Amidst all this, the two begin to fall in love.
The prince’s patronage allows Frances to set her creativity free, and her designs embolden him to create a public identity as Lady Crystallia, who soon becomes the fashion talk of Paris. When he sees a ballgown by seamstress Frances, he immediately knows that she has the artistic vision to bring his dreams to life. How about a fairy tale where the heroine is the fairy godmother and the prince needs a beautiful gown? Prince Sebastian of Belgium is hiding a secret: he loves wearing gowns, and dreams of donning something more bold and glamorous than his mother’s old castoffs.
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