‘It was like our own catwalk show with the world’s most famous woman’
The fairy-tale wedding dress every girl dreams of or the mass of silk taffeta which took Lady Diana Spencer to her fate? Season four of The Crown, out on Netflix on November 15, does an excellent job of making you wonder. For all that day’s pomp and ceremony, it is the vision of 20-year-old Diana in that gown – with its dramatically puffed sleeves, bow adornments and extravagant 25ft train – which has remained the default image, its meaning rewritten time and again over the years. We are on the cusp, it feels, of another reappraisal as The Crown revives the story of Charles and Diana’s marriage, which took place 40 years ago next July.
“When I heard that they were doing Diana’s dress, my ears pricked up,” says Elizabeth Emanuel who, along with her then-husband David, designed the wedding gown which cleverly entwined the oh-so-early-eighties New Romantic look with the timeless legend of a Prince who had found his Princess.
When it emerged that The Crown had recreated the Emanuels’ gown, it was reported that the original patterns had been lent to the costume department. “We’d never have done that,” Emanuel says, aghast at the thought of so closely blending art and reality, “but they did a very good interpretation.”
Watching the episode in which her dress appears has brought memories of the experience flooding back for Emanuel, who now has her own couture label. “It’s just like we remembered her, she gets across that innocence,” she says of actor Emma Corrin’s performance. “It was very poignant and moving, it didn’t happen like that from our point of view, but it reflected things that we weren’t aware of at the time.”
If Emanuel had written the episode charting the time between the engagement and wedding – presented in the The Crown as a period where Diana was trapped in a palace limbo, roller-skating down corridors one minute and taking lessons in etiquette the next, all while wearing the kinds of casually innocent, un-princessy outfits, like gingham trousers or sweet little cardigans, that she was often photographed in at the polo – then she’d have focused on the first fashion moment which she and David created with Prince Charles’s fiancée.
“We shared that journey with Diana as she developed her own style,” Emanuel, who was first introduced to Diana by Vogue’s Anna Harvey, the fashion editor who would go on to advise the Princess for the rest of her life, reflects. “I wish they’d shown all the amazing stuff that we did together.”
Where The Crown takes Diana straight from her flat in Earls Court
‘We wanted Diana to love it, but we wanted everyone else to see a fairy-tale dress’
to princess-in-the-tower life, the Emanuels witnessed – and orchestrated – her first dazzling moment in the limelight. This happened soon after the engagement announcement, when Diana accompanied Charles to a Royal Opera House fundraiser at Goldsmiths’ Hall. Grace Kelly (by then 51) was also in attendance, and you could look back on the night as one seasoned royal style muse who had epitomised an era passing the baton to the next.
“It was a grown-up, movie star dress. It was sexy and cut quite low. The royals don’t often wear black unless they’re in mourning, but we were innocent of those things, we just thought she looked stunning,” Emanuel remembers of the black gown which they chose for Diana that night, causing such a stir that it pushed Geoffrey Howe’s budget off the front pages. “We had no idea it would cause such a fuss. That was the first night she was regarded as a fashion icon. It was lift off,” adds Emanuel, making the swooshing sound of a rocket, “everything changed.”
The call to make The Dress came soon after. “I was slightly annoyed because I was at a critical point in a fitting but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I picked it up and it was Diana,” Emanuel remembers. “She asked, ‘Would you and David do me the honour of making my wedding dress?’ I think time stopped for a few seconds. We never thought it would be us, we were relatively inexperienced but we knew our lives would never be the same.”
Inspiration came effortlessly. “Everything was frills, lace and ruffles. Diana really liked the kinds of looks that we did. We wanted to do something that really resonated with the time,” she says. “It was like doing our own catwalk show with the most famous woman on the planet. We wanted Diana to love it, but for everyone else we wanted them to see a fairy-tale dress, like a Disney movie.”
In the book that the Emanuels wrote about the creation of Diana’s dress, they remember being driven to Buckingham Palace and dismissing staff so that they could work on that spellbinding train in secret. Their own lives mirrored Diana’s in many ways, with the press in constant pursuit of a clue about what the design would look like – their bins were searched and an apartment opposite their studio was rented out in the hope of a glimpse through the window.
Despite the scrutiny, it is kind, sweet Diana who sticks in Emanuel’s mind. “We didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes,” she says. “She was always very chatty and upbeat when she came in, so smiley that we had no idea what was going on behind the scenes.” Her only intimation that something was not right is the mystery of a dress they made for her which has never been seen.
“Looking back, we did a bright pink dress for the pre-wedding ball, it’s such a shame that it’s never been seen. She wanted to look amazing,” Emanuel recalls. “By then, she had this model figure so we did this dress that had a plunge neckline, slashed to the thigh. It was a completely different look to anything she’d worn up to that stage… even more superstar than the black dress.” The only pictures are ones Emanuel has of it hanging in the studio.
Emanuel had sugar tablets and
Fashion icon: Diana wears the famous black taffeta gown, below, designed for her by the Emanuels. Left, Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown safety pins at the ready on the big day, July 29 1981. Getting ready at Clarence House with the Queen Mother and her bridesmaids around her, Diana was “chatty and relaxed”. The finished gown “had a fragility about it… with a tiny waist and big skirt. It was very theatrical.” A Princess costume for a real-life Princess. “It was quite stressful, knowing that the world would be watching,” she adds, with an air of understatement.
Emma Corrin has already described how everyone on The Crown’s set fell silent when she appeared in the recreation of the Emanuels’ concoction. The atmosphere at the moment Diana was changing into her own dress, was comparable: “We knew there was all this noise outside, but we got her ready in a small side room where it was just very calm and quiet.”
That fragility, ultimately, came in part from the way the taffeta crushed in the carriage that brought Diana to St Paul’s Cathedral. Not an eventuality which had been planned for, but the Emanuels managed to smooth it quite swiftly
– all part of the charm of the historic moment.
Later, back at their studio, “it was an anticlimax. It was like giving birth and then a kind of postnatal depression.” Until they received a phone call from Diana, “thanking us for making her dress, that really made our day… she was meant to be on honeymoon somewhere. That was what she was like, so kind and sweet and thoughtful.”
Emanuel remains full of optimism about that day, and all of the ‘amazing ‘Eighties’ that came afterwards. If The Crown zooms in on Diana’s darker moments, then that is only refracted by the “happy, upbeat and bubbly” woman she remembers, who is also glimpsed. That one dress can symbolise that complexity? Well, all credit to the dress.