Mystery of the back-up dress that vanished
As well as creating The Dress, the emanuels were charged with making two more: one exact copy to go on display at Madame Tussauds, and another secret back-up wedding dress — Diana’s second choice design — in case the real thing was discovered before the big day.
This second choice dress was very similar: a flattering, boned bodice, frilly sleeves and a full puffball skirt, but the design on the bodice was more of a V-shape, the sleeves were shorter and there was no lace edging on the skirt, making it altogether plainer.
‘ It was only three- quarters finished — we simply didn’t have time to make it in its entirety, so none of the embroidery or finishing touches were done,’ says elizabeth.
Astonishingly, she admits she doesn’t know what happened to the dress after the wedding.
‘It was hanging up in the studio for a long time, and then it disappeared. I don’t know if we sold it or put it into storage. It was such a busy time. I’m sure it’ll turn up in a bag one day!’
Meanwhile, after the ceremony was over, the High street was flooded with copies of the emanuels’ precious dress, the first of which appeared in Oxford street shop windows at 3.30pm on the actual wedding day, just five hours after the press embargo on details of the gown and elizabeth’s sketches was lifted.
Ordinary brides could get their hands on a Diana rip- off for as little as £439 at Debenhams. ‘There was so much embroidery and lace and detail in the original that the copies just couldn’t match up,’ says elizabeth. ‘Of course, we knew they were going to do it, but they didn’t come close.’
THE SEVEN SEAMSTRESSES
KnOwn as the ‘emanuel ladies’, the designers’ team of seven seamstresses spent weeks on the dress. In particular, head seamstress nina Missetzis and her second-incommand, Rose Hoey, dedicated themselves full-time to it.
‘nina was Greek and couldn’t speak very good english,’ elizabeth explains. ‘even when she started with us, she was already quite elderly and slightly stooped with really long, bony hands — the result of the many years she had spent dressmaking. she was extremely meticulous and a real perfectionist, and would work long hours hunched up over the sewing machine.’
nina, who has sadly now passed away, never forgot her first meeting with Princess Diana: ‘she was so sweet, so shy. when she first came to see me, she didn’t want to take off her clothes so I could take her measurements. I told her if she didn’t, the dress would be too big, so she did.
‘As I was pinning the pattern to her, I could tell it was very new to her, to be fitted. when she tried on the gown for the first time, she got very emotional and cried.’
Rose Hoey, meanwhile, recalled an exchange during the train fitting at the Palace in April.
‘I remember saying to Diana that it was amazing to think I was on the inside, having stood outside as a tourist so many times. she laughed and said we should go out on to the balcony and wave at all the people — and we did!’
Diana never forgot the devoted seamstresses who toiled day and night to perfect her dress.
Once, elizabeth returned to the studio to find the Princess had sneaked up the stairs and into the attic where they were working to thank them personally for all their hard work. she even invited them to the wedding — ‘ suddenly everyone needed a new frock!’ elizabeth laughs.
HOME-GROWN MATERIALS
One of the most important factors for elizabeth was the provenance of the dress materials.
‘As soon as the news was announced, the phone started ringing off the hook with weavers, fabric specialists and embroiderers offering everything under the sun,’ she explains. ‘Our main focus was to make it as British as possible.’
They sourced the lace from Roger watson, a family- run firm in nottingham, which supplied £1,000 worth of material for the waist, hem and train.
The detailing was inspired by Diana’s family coat of arms — featuring geometric shapes and scallop shells — and incorporated a square of antique Carrickmacross lace, an heirloom dating from the time of Queen Mary, donated by the Royal school of needlework.
The silk came from stephen walters & sons, a suffolk weaver dating back to the 1700s, which has been run by the same family for ten generations.
‘I heard that the emanuels had got the job and wrote to them the next day,’ explains David walters, managing director at the time.
eager to stick to the British theme, they plundered all the raw silk they could from worms at lullingstone silk farm in Kent. sadly, there wasn’t enough — 11,000 strands of raw silk were used — so they had to make up the difference with imported silk.
A team of 150 at stephen walters, which had also done Princess Anne’s wedding dress and the silk lining for the Queen’s Coronation robe, got to work immediately.
‘It’s a long-winded process,’ David explains. ‘You have to twist the threads, then dye it, then weave it on a loom. The weaving alone takes ten days; the whole thing took around eight weeks.’
staff were sworn to secrecy and each worked on a different part of the dress so that no one knew what the finished design looked like. They produced two 41-metre rolls.
‘The emanuels thought it was a good idea to have a back-up in case someone spilt coffee on it.’
The fabric itself was an ivorycoloured, heavyweight taffeta.
David recalls: ‘It had that crisp feel; proper crunchy taffeta, deliberately chosen for the look they wanted. The next time we saw it was on TV on the wedding day. we were all gathered round and when she got out of the car there was a collective gasp at how crushed it looked.
‘But it wasn’t a mistake — the emanuels had wanted that fabric — and they soon straightened it out. The finished dress looked incredible.
We felt very proud.’ Though David and his staff never met Diana, they presented her with a pretty wooden box containing the silk worms used to make the material for her dress.
Unfortunately, reveals Elizabeth, ‘they hatched not long afterwards — so we had to throw it away!’
THE BOISTEROUS BRIDESMAIDS
OnE of Elizabeth’s most treasured memories from that time is a bridesmaids’ fitting, when Lady Diana arrived at the studio accompanied by five boisterous girls on red roller-skates.
They proceeded to whizz around the room in their toile dresses, making Diana, Elizabeth and the seamstresses fall about laughing.
Diana’s five bridesmaids were: Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones (now Chatto), the eldest at 17 and Princess Margaret’s daughter; India Hicks, 13, Prince Charles’s goddaughter; Sarah- Jane Gaselee, 11, whose father was Charles’s horse trainer; Catherine Cameron, six, another goddaughter; and Clementine Hambro, a petite, blonde five-year-old
and a pupil at the nursery where Diana worked. Inspired by a postcard she had been sent by a friend, depicting a Victorian flower girl with a ballerina-length dress, ribbon sash and pretty floral bouquet, Elizabeth had plenty of ideas for frocks.
‘Although we wanted to keep the style of the bridesmaids’ dresses romantic, historical and very pretty, like Diana’s own gown, we were also keen to make them a bit different from each other, as was appropriate for their different ages,’ Elizabeth explains.
All were made from the same colour silk as Diana’s dress, but of a slightly lighter weight, with fitted bodices, net petticoats and ruffled skirts trimmed with lace, tiny pearls and sequins.
While the two youngest had ruffled, flouncy styles, the two middle girls had more sophisticated collars — and Lady Sarah Armstrong- Jones, the eldest, had a sleeker, straighter skirt.
Florist Edward Goodyear designed white and gold flower baskets for them to carry, with pretty floral circlets for the heads of the four youngest. Round their waists, each wore a gold silk sash, inspired by the Mountbatten roses in Diana’s bouquet, and on their feet were matching gold shoes.
India Hicks, now 49 and a former model with her own lifestyle brand, has said her first reaction on being asked to be a bridesmaid was one of ‘horror’. She recalled: ‘I was a tomboy from rural Oxfordshire, never out of jodhpurs. I was horrified — I was going to have to wear a dress.’
She first met Diana at a fitting and says she was ‘more like a head girl than a princess-in-waiting’.
‘Frill after frill, pin after pin, hour after hour, we stood silently . . . Although I found all those petticoats, puffed sleeves and bows hard to forgive, it was an intimate and informal time with Diana.’
Together with Sarah Armstrong-Jones, India was charged with the far-from- straightforward task of carrying Diana’s train. ‘Manipulating that much taffeta and antique lace in and out of the small state carriages posed considerable complications,’ she said.
‘We practised first with a long dust cloth tied to Diana’s waist. She stood patiently as we were shown how to fold and unfold the fabric.’ Having arrived at Clarence House at 7.30 am on the wedding day, the bridesmaids recall a fun, girly morning: Diana rushing around in a pair of old jeans, the Spencer tiara balanced on her head, smiling as she watched footage of herself on TV.
‘During one commercial break, an advert for Cornetto ice cream came on, and she started singing,’ India recalled. ‘Soon we all joined in. “Just one Cornnnneeetttoo” could be heard from the top floor.’
Clementine Hambro, known as the ‘sobbing bridesmaid’, after a photograph of Diana helping her up when she fell over and banged her head at the Palace became famous, remembers little — but she was only knee-high at the time.
‘Disappointingly,’ she says, ‘ my recollections of the actual service are of achingly tired legs, of desperately wanting to sit down when we were not allowed to, and of doggedly staring at my little gold shoes . . . determined not to step on that magnificent train.’
After the ceremony, the bridesmaids relished travelling in the royal carriage past crowds throwing confetti that landed in the laps of their dresses.
Back at the Palace, the two eldest helped Diana change into her going-away outfit, and all five gathered to wave her off.
‘Though the Princess smiled all day, she was suffering from a crushing headache,’ revealed SarahJ-ane Gaselee — who admitted in 2015 that she ‘bitterly regretted’ selling her dress for £11,000. ‘As we stepped out on to the balcony, she complained her tiara was killing her, it was so heavy.’
PARASOL THAT WAS NEVER USED
THE weather forecast for the wedding day wasn’t great — grey with a risk of showers, warned the BBC — and so Elizabeth felt it would be wise to have an umbrella to hand, just in case.
A month or so before the wedding, she nipped into Phillips auction house — a few doors down from the couple’s studio on Brook Street — and picked up a pair of antique silk parasols with wooden handles.
‘ We covered them in white and ivory fabric — two colours so no one would know which matched her dress,’ explains Elizabeth.
‘They were then trimmed with the same lace as the dress and hand- embroidered with tiny pearls and sequins.’
On the morning of the royal wedding, the ivory parasol was tucked inside the carriage that would take the bride to St Paul’s — on Diana’s father’s side — so he could keep his daughter dry if the skies opened.
Mercifully, they didn’t; it turned out to be quite a dry, pleasant day and the parasol remained out of sight.
‘It was probably a good thing,’ laughs Elizabeth. ‘It was made of such light material that it certainly wasn’t waterproof — it wouldn’t have done her much good!’
The umbrella ended up being exhibited at Madame Tussauds along with the replica of Diana’s extraordinary dress.