The King and Queen have absolutely smashed their first year on the throne. Not only did rock’n’roll Charles crowdsurf at Glastonbury, he also belted out a pop banger with Queen C at Eurovision, wore rainbow sequins to Pride and went on a sexy holibobs to Hydra. It truly is the modernisation of the monarchy.
Or at least it is in the eyes of Hey Reilly, the anonymous Scottish artist who uses AI to create spoof images of our Royal Highnesses in wildly improbable scenarios. Online he has created a fantasy world for Charles and Camilla, or #CamCha as he calls them on Instagram, where he posts his digital artworks. Reilly’s King Charles often resembles a dapper bon vivant with a Seventies porn king aesthetic. “It suits him, right?!” Reilly enthuses. “The King is a very stylish man, we know this already. I’m just playing with our British sense of reverence — and the lack of it.”
On other days the King and Queen are couture royalty, being snapped for their experimental street style at the shows in London, Paris and Milan. Charles is at turns a punk in head-to-toe leather with treacherous spikes and an avant-garde influencer who looks totally relaxed in an inflatable silver jumpsuit. “I love the ultimate silliness of ultra-high fashion on the royals. It just works. It’s the high-low, the mock serious, the punch-down of formality.”
Reilly’s first post of the year was an image of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, though his version features Harry with a giant ginger bouffant. Naturally the book was renamed Hair (“the uncut version”). Charles has also been depicted with a variety of extreme dos, including the long scraggly hair of a tree hugger and the luscious locks of a wizened old Game of Thrones character. “The whole human race has a hair obsession,” Reilly says. “It tickles our deep, collective monkey brain seeing unexpected hair. It’s like the magic of wigs. Ask a drag queen!”
Does he ever worry about ruffling royal feathers? “I’ve always wondered about getting a cease and desist but honestly, my work comes from a place of joy and is never intended to harm. They can take a bit of playful satire. I reckon they like it.
“Anyway, I recently had an email with the big Royal Warrant on it and it really scared me at first. I thought ‘Yikes! Here we go. Off with his head!’ But it was the Royal Collection Trust and they asked if they could have a print of one of my images of the Queen, to go into the collection. I’m so chuffed!”
The King’s had a busy year in Reillyworld. After his fabulous Liberace-esque coronation party, he and the Queen wore matching silver leather to perform at Eurovision (“even trying to compete with that epic mess of silliness is a challenge”) and went on holiday to Hydra where he was photographed in a floral shorts suit. Why Hydra? “Because I went to Hydra for my holibobs this year! It’s quite low-key bouji there, you know? Quite yachty, quite rich. There was an arts festival on when we went, loads of influencers draped around making TikToks, so it was natural to put [King Charles] there.” And although the King rocked out at Glastonbury, Reilly says he’d rather go to the festival with Meghan and Kate together. “I liberate an alternative storyline for them and maybe Glasto is exactly the kind of place it could happen.”
Reilly uses AI image generators to create this alt world for the royals. He writes text prompts such as “King Charles outside a British pub dressed as Superman holding a pint and a 75th-birthday cake” into an online AI image-maker and sees what it comes up with. The aim is to humanise the “big scary power of AI by adding art and humour”.
And there is something uniquely funny about seeing a royal surrendering to wild abandon. Often Reilly’s images show them deliriously happy and in the midst of a goofy dance move. “It’s like when it gets messy at the Christmas party and the bosses start dancing. It’s that chaotic energy, then the snap and release,” Reilly says. “We all know that feeling. We all love that, right?”