The wedding dress of the century explained & how the backup managed to vanish into thin air

The atmosphere, recalls Elizabeth Emanuel, was electric, even at six o’clock in the morning. ‘Crowds were already amassing outside and we had to drive past the barricades, which made us feel terribly important.

‘When we got inside Clarence House, where Diana had been living since her engagement to Charles, all the bridal party were there.

‘Everyone was singing along to the adverts on TV, drinking orange juice and eating biscuits, and watching the festivities.

‘I remember Judith Chalmers, who was presenting the BBC coverage, wondering what the dress would look like — and thinking: “We know!” ’

For designers Elizabeth and David Emanuel, in their late 20s and not long out of fashion school, it was a career-defining moment.

Months earlier, in March 1981, Buckingham Palace had announced, to widespread surprise, that the Emanuels had been asked to design the dress Lady Diana Spencer would wear to marry Prince Charles.

It was the commission of a lifetime to make the dress of the century. And now, here they were, just hours from seeing Diana become a Princess in their history-making creation.

The dress had been delivered to Clarence House from their London studio the day before. Now, while Diana had her make-up and hair done, Elizabeth and David shook out the frothy lace and metres of silk.

Proceedings ran to a tight schedule: the Emanuels were given clipboards with to-do lists and palace aides ran around issuing orders about when things were supposed to happen.

When the time came, they were ushered into a bedroom to dress the bride. First, Diana put on her petticoat, then her shoes, and finally the dress. Just as she was gazing at herself in the mirror, Elizabeth panicked that she hadn’t done up the fastening on the petticoat, and David had to crawl underneath the skirts to check.

‘It had a double hook to make sure it didn’t fall off,’ she explains. ‘We wanted her to feel comfortable, but it also had to be secure.’

Just at that moment, the Queen Mother popped in to say hello to the bride, leaving David very flustered indeed.

Once the bridesmaids were dressed, they helped escort the bridal party down the grand staircase and into the carriage, folding the enormous train, concertina-style — ‘like you would fold a bed sheet’ — to ensure it didn’t get crushed. It was a manoeuvre they’d spent hours practising.

Elizabeth and David then rushed to St Paul’s, accompanied by a police escort, so they could arrive before the bride. In her handbag, Elizabeth had packed a bottle of smelling salts and some sugar tablets, in case Diana felt faint, but in the end it was the designer who needed the sugar to calm her own nerves.

Standing to one side of the cathedral entrance, they anxiously peered out until cheering crowds announced the arrival of the carriage. But as they watched Diana climb the steps, the Emanuels’ hearts sank: the dress was noticeably crumpled.

‘I remember whispering to David: “Oh my God, it’s creased,”’ she says. ‘I thought: “We’ve got to straighten out that dress.”

‘In the tiny carriage, it had crumpled far more than we’d anticipated. We’d done a rehearsal, but not with her father, Earl Spencer, in the car, too — and he was quite a large man.

‘It was a hot day, there was so much volume in the net and she was nervous, so she kept grabbing hold of it in her hands. Fortunately, we knew the fabric would pull out — that’s why we were there.

‘When she came out of that carriage, it was the most wonderful vision I’d ever seen. She looked like a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis, unfurling her wings and about to fly. It was so romantic. Oddly, the imperfections seemed to make her even more beautiful.’ While the world watched on television, Elizabeth and David, with the help of the bridesmaids, smoothed out Diana’s dress, adjusted her veil and spread out that astonishing train.

As Lady Diana walked down the aisle to the strains of the Prince of Denmark’s March, the Emanuels were ushered to their seats.

Sitting behind a pillar, they could see little and didn’t witness the full splendour of their creation until they saw it on the evening news.

Halfway through the ceremony, they got a tap on the shoulder: it was time to make their way to the Palace, where they would greet the new Princess of Wales and prepare her for the photographs.

Elizabeth and David, equipped with pins and an emergency sewing kit, checked the dress and helped arrange the veil for the official wedding portraits, which were taken by Lord Lichfield.

‘One of the most amazing things was watching the balcony scene from behind,’ Elizabeth says.

‘It was a truly magical moment, being on the inside looking out as the crowds waved and cheered.’ By the time the couple returned to their studio in Mayfair, it was late. ‘It was eerily quiet,’ Elizabeth recalls. ‘We’d had this huge build-up and suddenly it was over.’

Around 6.30pm, just as the Emanuels were leaving the studio, the phone rang. To their surprise, it was Diana, thanking them one last time for making her dress. ‘It meant so much. There she was, exhausted on the evening of her wedding, taking the time to call us. But that was her all over.’

It wasn’t until the following day that, to her horror, Elizabeth remembered she had left a safety pin — temporarily fixing the petticoat in place — in the dress. Thankfully, under all the layers of net, tulle and silk, it had gone unnoticed by the thousands of wedding guests and millions of viewers worldwide.

The Emanuels’ relationship with Diana began on January 8, 1981, with a phone call to their tiny Brook Street showroom. Crouched on her hands and knees, Elizabeth was busy dressing a client, so she yelled to one of her assistants to take the call.

On the line was a new customer asking Elizabeth if she would make her a dress for a friend’s upcoming 21st birthday party. ‘Debra’ — as her name was mistakenly taken down — made an appointment for 2.30pm that afternoon.

Of course, ‘Debra’ was Diana, and when she arrived Elizabeth couldn’t believe her eyes.

‘I recognised her immediately. She’d been in the papers since she and Charles had started dating the previous year — but photographs didn’t do her justice. I was immediately stuck by her height, her beautiful blue eyes and that flawless complexion.’

Diana was just 19, and with that appointment began a lifelong love affair with fashion. Over the following months, Elizabeth and David (who are now divorced but continue to work separately as designers) made several outfits for her, as she found her feet in the spotlight and sought to transform herself from young, shy nursery teacher to the fiancee of Prince Charles — and, at that time, the future Queen of England.

After the birthday gown came a pale pink, high-necked chiffon blouse, borrowed by the fashion team at Vogue magazine for a romantic shoot with Diana by Lord Snowdon, the publication of which coincided with her engagement.

Another outfit the Emanuels designed for Diana — perhaps the most iconic before the wedding dress — was a strapless, figure-hugging black taffeta ballgown which she wore to London’s Goldsmiths’ Hall to mark her first appearance as Prince Charles’s bride-to-be.

The next day, March 10, amid mounting speculation about who would design the royal wedding dress, the Palace announced that the Emanuels — whose taffeta creation had been splashed all over the papers — had won the contract that every designer in the country had been dreaming of. ‘We’d actually been asked by Diana herself the previous week, and she’d already been in for a chat,’ recalls Elizabeth, now 63 and with a studio of her own in upmarket Maida Vale.

Though the Emanuels’ fledgling business was doing well — clients included Bianca Jagger and the Duchess of Kent — nothing could compare to designing a royal wedding dress.

‘From the minute she asked us, we knew nothing was going to be the same,’ Elizabeth says.

But there was little time for celebration. Elizabeth’s imagination went into overdrive. There was no direction from the Palace — other than the overriding need for discretion — and even less from Diana herself, then still so new to the world of fashion.

‘I tracked down every book I could find on royal weddings from history: Queen Victoria; her daughter, Princess Beatrice; Queen Mary,’ she explains. ‘And I watched all my favourite old films: The Leopard, Gone With The Wind, Barry Lyndon. Inspiration came from everywhere.’

Elizabeth stuck cuttings and photographs into a large scrapbook, filled with romantic frills, flounces and fairytale bridal wear, which she still leafs through with pride today.

At Diana’s first wedding meeting, she tried on a series of sample dresses — everything from slinky Twenties-style gowns to huge, bouffant petticoats with satin skirts and boned bodices — to get an idea of what she liked.

She settled on a sample much like the finished look: a dress with a big skirt, tiny waist and soft frills round the sleeves and shoulders.

Next time they met, the trio sat on the floor, cross-legged, poring over around 50 sketches Elizabeth had based on Diana’s chosen silhouette. Diana had brought along her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who rather sternly analysed the Emanuels’ offerings.

‘The carpet was covered in pencil drawings,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Diana and her mother both sat stunned and speechless for the first few minutes before they began examining the sketches.

‘We held our breath for what seemed like for ever — and finally they broke into smiles. It didn’t take long to pick the final design.’

They also settled on a colour: vintage-style, creamy ivory.

‘This was so flattering to her English rose complexion,’ Elizabeth explains. ‘I find that white lace tends to look cheap. Ivory enhanced Diana’s pale, natural beauty.’

The call went out to fabric producers, dressmakers and embroiderers nationwide that the Emanuels were looking for the raw materials for Diana’s dress — and phone calls and letters began flooding the studio with offers of British textiles, sequins, pearls and jewels.

But rather than getting to work straight away, their first task was more practical: security. Ever since the news had broken that the Emanuels would be responsible for the dress, their studio had been besieged by journalists, photographers and TV crews desperate for a scoop.

Elizabeth and David installed blinds on their windows and manoeuvred a heavy-duty safe in through the first-floor window of their little mews building so they could lock up sketches and fabric swatches overnight.

‘It sounds a bit over-the-top, but it really did seem like people would go to any lengths to find out what the dress looked like,’ Elizabeth says.

Another tactic was to give Diana a pseudonym. Throughout this period, they dubbed her ‘Debra’, in memory of that first phone call, or ‘Dorothy Cornwall’, a moniker that now seems oddly prophetic given the title of Charles’s second wife.

While there was constant hubbub outside the Emanuels’ studio, activity inside was even more frenzied. Having outsourced the making of the shoes and the bouquet, and commissioned silk weavers and lace manufacturers — all home-grown, family-run companies — the Emanuels were left to concentrate on fittings with Diana.

The process was relatively straightforward, in theory at least. Elizabeth’s sketch was turned into a pattern, which was cut out in calico — unbleached, unprocessed cotton — to make a mock-up of the dress, called a ‘toile’.

Diana came to the studio, often with her mother in tow, and tried on the toile. Hovering around her with scissors, pins and fabric marker, the Emanuels would fit the pattern around her body as she twirled, laughed and chatted about the big day.

‘She was always very ready to come to fittings,’ Elizabeth says. ‘And she never complained when we kept her standing in one position for hours.’

But the regular fittings were complicated by Diana’s persistent weight loss.

At her first session with the Emanuels back in January 1981, her waist measured 29 in — reasonably healthy for a slim, 5 ft 10 in girl. But between the announcement of her engagement in February and the wedding in July, her waistline seemed to shrink daily.

By the big day, it was a tiny 23.5 inches. ‘Every time she turned up for a fitting, she had lost more weight,’ reveals Elizabeth.

‘We put it down to nerves. But it did make it incredibly difficult for us to get on with making the dress. We had to keep taking the bodice in and changing the pattern. The last thing we wanted was to make it up in silk, then have to play around with that. Silk soon looks worn if you work it too much.’

There were five different versions of the bodice, each made to fit Diana’s dwindling figure, before the silk version was cut just weeks before the big day. ‘She was incredibly tiny by the end,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We literally sewed her into the dress. I suddenly got this fear of her train falling off as she was walking up the aisle. It would have been awful.’

Little did they — or the world — know that Diana’s shrinking waist marked the start of a battle with eating disorders that would plague her for the rest of her life.

In the end, she came in for as many as 15 fittings — Elizabeth lost count, there were so many — to make sure every detail was just right. The bodice and skirt were made of lustrous ivory silk taffeta, and the trim on the bodice, sleeves and edges of the skirt was lace, overlaid with 10,000 pearls and 3mm mother-of-pearl sequins.

A taffeta bow was placed where the halves of her collar met, mirrored by bows and frothy lace at the ends of her sleeves. Underneath, Diana wore a huge petticoat made from more than 90 metres of tulle, a lightweight starched netting, which had to be ‘trimmed’ into shape rather like a head of hair.

There were another 140 metres of tulle in the veil, as well as a spare petticoat and an extra silk skirt which could be fitted over the original ‘just in case she spilt something down herself on the day’. When they reached the final stages, it was all hands on deck.

Even so, the Emanuels began to worry that the intricate sequin-sewing was taking too long, so they called in a few favours: Elizabeth’s mother and the mother of their PA, Caroline Slocock, pitched in to help with the embroidery.

‘It was a real family affair. So much love went into that dress.’

Diana came for her final fitting a fortnight before the wedding — the first time she had laid eyes on the finished dress.

‘It was suddenly very real. She was just so excited — you could see it in her eyes.’

After a top-secret rehearsal at St Paul’s (minus the dress) on July 27, it was time to transport the gown to Clarence House.

‘We were so paranoid about it all going wrong in the final hours,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We didn’t trust anyone to drive us, so we hired a van. Even en route we were convinced we were being hijacked.

‘We drove into Albemarle Street and a big cart pulled across the road and blocked us in. We thought: “That’s it, it’s a heist.” But it was just the London traffic.’

Dress offloaded, the Emanuels returned to their studio, though they had to be back at Clarence House at 6am the next day. For the designer duo, the wedding represented an extraordinary achievement; a moment of high drama and excitement.

On August 6, they issued a bill for the dress to Diana’s mother, for 1,000 guineas, £1,050 at the time (£4,140 today) — a token sum, as Diana usually paid full price for her clothes. In fact, the dress was then valued at £9,000 — £35,500 today.

As a result of their discretion and the close friendship forged at one of the most momentous times of Diana’s life, the three remained close and the Emanuels continued to design dresses for royal tours.

‘The last time I saw her was at the auction of her dresses at Christie’s, two months before she died,’ says Elizabeth. ‘She seemed so happy. She’d grown up a lot since we first met her — that nervous, pretty young thing who had no idea about what suited her or what she liked to wear.

‘By the end, Diana understood she didn’t even have to say anything: her clothes spoke for her.

‘She was an icon.’

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.’

Source: Daily Mail.