Designer explores a memory in recreating a dress for Diana
This is a dress with a story, and Elizabeth Emanuel wants to tell it.
Shocking pink with a plunging, ruffled neckline, the gown was designed by Emanuel for Lady Diana Spencer to wear at a Buckingham Palace party a few days before her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981. It was a visual coming-out for the future princess, until then largely known for her conservative sweater-and-pearls look.
“This was not a wallflower dress,” said Emanuel, who also designed Diana’s wedding gown. “This was a dress to be seen in and celebrated.”
It was also soon forgotten. In an era before smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket and social media made private events public, the dress was mostly seen by the party guests, including Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Grace and Nancy Reagan, but no one else. Emanuel doesn’t know where it is, or even if it still exists.
So she has recreated it, out of bolts of satin taffeta cut and stitched to match the dramatic sketches she made more than 40 years ago.
Acting on an idea that took shape during Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns, she did it for herself, for her archive, but also because she wanted to show another side of Diana, who Emanuel believes has been misrepresented by The Crown , the Netflix series that has brought the story of the princess and her ill-fated marriage to a new generation.
A fan of the series’ first three seasons, Emanuel said she found it hard to watch the last two because of the way Diana was depicted.
Creating a bespoke dress is a long process, requiring multiple fittings that give client and dressmaker lots of time to talk. And throughout the hours they spent together, Diana came across as a happy, vibrant young woman, not the shrinking girl The Crown portrays as being buffeted by events beyond her control, Emanuel said.
“She wasn’t like that,” Emanuel said. “She was always very upbeat. And I like to feel that we were close enough because those fittings are fairly intimate.”
One of the things the series does right is retrace Diana’s style journey, from the cardigans and bows she wore when she first stepped into the public eye, to frothy ballgowns with frills and finally to her becoming a global fashion icon in Versace, Dior and Chanel.
Diana grew up in the country, looking to her older sisters for fashion cues. This was a world of hunting, shooting and fishing, where Barbour coats and Wellington boots were everyday wear. It was a culture where no matter how much you cared about your appearance, you had to seem like you weren’t trying too hard.
Diana brought that style sense with her when she moved to London after leaving school and soon became the archetype of the Sloane Ranger, the media name for the wealthy young people who lived near London’s Sloane Square and cultivated the look of bohemian aristocrats.
She was, as former BBC royal reporter Michael Cole put it, “this Sloane Ranger with her pie crust collars and Fair Isle sweaters and voluminous skirts. She was a product of the English countryside.”
But after her engagement to the future King Charles III, she began to grow into being a princess.
“She came to understand the power of clothes, the power of image. It helped very much that she had good taste and good advisers,” Cole said.
After losing weight, Diana asked Emanuel, her former husband David and their team to create a dress that would show off her new supermodel figure and transform her image.
“She wanted something spectacular and eye-catching because the whole world was going to be there,’’ Emanuel said at her London studio.
But for Emanuel, the project is about more than setting the record straight. It’s about one friend remembering another and the helping hand the princess gave to her career.
There is something touching about the way she looks at this copy and adjusts it on a mannequin roughly as tall as Diana, plainly remembering her famous client.
She recreated a dress that belonged to the Diana she knew, who broke the mold, who was brave.
“As I’m looking at it, I’m imagining her face,” Emanuel said. “The last time we saw her in the dress was at that party and looking radiant and fantastic.’’