Dear readers of sport&beauty. Today we’re going to talk about Royals and fashion. Perhaps you are wondering what Royalty has to do with fashion. Well, I’ll tell you that in my opinion fashion and royalty converge in one woman. Here you are some clues. She’s the world’s youngest Queen. She’s brunette, has brown eyes, and is 175 centimeters tall. She’s gorgeous and a fashion victim. She loves Elie Saab’s designs and is also a campaigning activist for social issues. Bingo. I’m referring to Queen Rania of Jordan. Today’s post is dedicated to Rania a real fashion victim. Here you are Queen Rania, the world’s most beautiful Queen.
Queen Rania of Jordan is not precisely a blue-blooded Queen. Rania Al-Yassin was born on August 31, 1970 in Kuwait. Being born from Palestinian parents, her roots are placed close to the West bank of the Jordan River, an area that was annexed by Jordan in 1948 and Israel in 1967. Owing to this mess Rania’s father, a pediatrIcian, settled in Kuwait at the beginning of the 1960,s where he became a wealthy man together with her wife and three children.
Queen Rania of Jordan attended primary and secondary school at the “New English School” in Kuwait, and afterwards studied Business Administration at Cairo’s American University where she graduated. After finishing University at Cairo, and due to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, Rania wasn’t able to return to her motherland so she went to Jordan where she met her family that had already fled from Kuwait. There, Rania tried to pursue a career in banking and finance. Therefore, Rania started working for Citibank before joining the Apple Computer local office in Amman to spend a spell working in the field of Information Technology.
Rania’s life changed dramatically while working for Apple Computer in Amman. In January 1993, and due to her work in the business sector, Rania received an invitation to attend a dinner. The invitation came from Princess Aisha of Jordan, one of the seven children of the late King Hussein. Aisha’s brother, King Abdullah II, was in the Army but that weekend he was on leave so he dropped at his sister’s party by chance. It seems that Abdullah was captivated by Rania’s beauty although at the beginning she didn’t pay too much attention to him. You know, girls usually play hard to get with boys and it often works!!. Later Rania told Harper’s Bazaar that, in the beginning, she was kind of scared in front of the Prince and thought he would probably be a kind of playboy. Looking at him I wouldn’t say he’s a playboy. I’m sure that if he were not a Prince he wouldn’t have conquered such a beautiful woman as Rania. It’s always been said that money and power make people prettier....
After they met at Aisha’s party, Rania and Abdullah started to date secretly in order not to draw media attention. Anyway they didn’t go out together for long since they got married five months after their first date. Rania became a Princess by marriage although almost nobody thought she would become the Queen of Jordan one day since Abdulla was third in the succession line after his father’s uncle and a stepbrother. This way, Rania joined a Royal Household which was relatively modern in its attitude toward the role of women. Her mother-in-law was King Hussein’s fourth wife, an American architect of Syrian-Lebanese origin named Lisa Halaby, also known as King Noor of Jordan.
Rania and Abdullah increased their family size in 1994 when she gave birth to Hussein, soon followed by Iman (1996) and Hashem (2005). Nevertheless, everything changed for the young couple in February 1999 after King Hussein changed his last will just before his death. King Hussein appointed Prince Abdullah as his heir which became a surprise for the entire World. Anyway, let’s continue talking about Rania. Her beauty and photogenic have earned Rania some comparisons with the late Princess Diana, a tireless fighter in charity and social aid campaigns. In addition to her stunning beauty, Queen Rania is also a fashion victim and it’s well known that she loves to wear designs created by the Lebanese designer Elie Saab.
After her marriage, Princess Rania has taken advantage of her status to try and improve the quality of life of the Jordanian society and the Arab World. She’s a passionate advocate for education, social development and equality of economic opportunities for everybody. Her activities cover fields as diverse as education (in April 2008 she launched “Madrasati”, my school, a public-private initiative to refurbish 500 public schools in Jordan), the improvement of life conditions within the community, health, children, youth, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, and environment amongst others. Here you can see some pictures of Queen Rania of Jordan taken by Mario Testino for Vanity Fair Spain in 2008.
Out of curiosity we can say that Queen Rania is an Internet and new Technologies buff. She’s got her own supporters page on Facebook intended to talk people into discussing topics such as intercultural dialogue, education and the different means to be used to promote social change and, as of July 2010, over 250,000 people had "Liked" her page. In May 2009 and coinciding with the visit of the Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan, Rania started to use Tweeter as @QueenRania and also in 2009 on the occasion of the celebration of the World Economic Forum held in Jordan she gave her first interview on Twitter answering five questions from her account on the social network. Her tweets range from personal issues and family pictures to more serious issues such as Ketsana typhoon in the Philipines, the riots in the aftermath of Iran’s elections in 2009, peace in the Middle East and the promotion of Jordan. She has achieved such a great success that as of August 2010, only fifteen months after joining Tweeter, Rania had over 1,300,000 followers.
Rania has also tried her luck as a writer achieving also great success in this field of Arts. So far, she has written for books. The first one “The King’s Gift” is a children’s book about King Hussein whose proceeds will go to the benefit of Jordan’s underprivileged children. Her second book, entitled “Eternal Beauty”, was written in celebration of Mother’s Day 2008. For the 2009 Big Read event, Queen Rania wrote “Maha of the Mountains”, a book about a young girl and her determination to get an education and the challenges she faced. Finally, “the Sandwich Swap”, released in April 2010 and written by Rania in cooperation with Kelly DiPucchio, is a book inspired by an incident in Queen Rania’s childhood. To finish today’s post I will leave you a slideshow with the best pictures of Queen Rania of Jordan and a couple of videos so you can see this beautiful and fashionable Queen live. Best regards.
