Sitting down to watch long-anticipated seasons five and six of Netflix’s The Crown, namely the Diana years, I eagerly anticipated a glimpse of their take on the famous “Revenge” dress, a black mini Diana wore while separated from Prince Charles, above most plot events or character portrayals. Its screen time totals only seconds. Instead, the bulk of the scenes offered a voyeuristic rendering of casual, intimate moments in which Diana, the Queen, and all consorts dressed accordingly. Naturally, these are spaces in which costume designers Amy and Sidonie Roberts could only guess the ensembles present. And by guess, I mean pore over research and meticulously concoct an ensemble they believe the characters would have worn at the time.
“You have these public moments where Amy and I will [replicate pre-existing looks],” costume designer Sidonie Roberts said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “And what’s lovely is we build trust with the audience, and so when we go into those private moments, we are able to take them to our imagined version of something. And people trust us to come there because they know that we’ve educated ourselves in how they dress and how they are and what they do.”
“[The Crown] has a large burden in the costume design [department],” explains FIT professor Daniel James Cole, Co-author of The History of Modern Fashion, “because a lot of what they're depicting is very familiar to much of the audience.” We’ve all seen the revenge dress cataloged on @ladydirevengelooks and subsequently shared 100 times. The bike shorts and Harvard sweatshirts feature regularly on our Explore page. The pressure’s on. The former costume designer helps to crystallize our evaluation of these attempts, and his report is favorable. Ahead, a conversation about the costume design excellency on The Crown.
As with any dramatization, you have this spectrum of historical accuracy and a story using these clothes to craft the perfect arc that doesn't always align perfectly. I'd be so curious to hear where you think "The Crown" falls on this spectrum and any positive or negative commentary that comes with where you place them.
“I will say I am a fan of The Crown, and I think the show has a large burden in the costume design [department], but also in casting, in production design, because a lot of what they're depicting is very familiar to much of the audience. Now, that familiarity, I think, was less so when they were in season one and season two. Gen X or boomers today don't have a clear memory of what the Norman Hartnell dresses were like back when Elizabeth wore them. But as we've approached the recent seasons, especially seasons five and six, we have images of Charles, Diana, Sarah, and Andrew that are familiar to people still alive. They have strong, firsthand memories of those images of the wedding and news coverage.
“The Crown‘s design team has to balance accuracy with the needs of the script and then working with different cameras, etc. So, as a generalization, the costume and production design of The Crown is excellent. It has a very high degree of accuracy within the confines of it being a dramatized narrative.”
I've read interviews with the costume designers, and I think what stuck out to me was that they were trying to hit on these obvious picturesque moments to do what “build trust,” so that when they were working on these private moments where you wouldn't know what people are wearing, that they could conceive of their ideas of what the royal family members would be wearing. Do you think they did a good job in those spaces where they're not depicting literal images of exact garb?
“I also think they're doing an excellent job with that. In the series, Diana spends a great deal of time in casual clothing. She's not dressed to be camera-ready for the paparazzi or the news; she's hanging out at her apartment or in a private moment. When I watch the show, I don't see Diana stop being Diana, even when she's in casual clothes. Of course, that is in great part because of the excellent casting and the wonderful job that that actress is doing, but also, the success rests with the costume design choices. To me, Charles always looks like Charles and the Queen—I totally buy her when she's in her casual clothes, which are always not all that casual. As you said, there are so many private moments in the show with no established [reference].
“I think they have recreated the memorable images well to build the trust they mentioned. And often, those memorable moments are quite brief. When they had Diana's funeral, the coverage of the actual funeral was very sparse and isolated into little individual vignettes, which I found fascinating and different from how that same event was treated in The Queen.”
There's also something so almost voyeuristic about seeing any royal family member in relatively casual attire. After Diana divorces Charles, she gets much more relaxed. From those interviews, they set out these rules about Diana in particular and her evolution through seasons five and six. Initially, it was shapeless garments and long skirts; then, the clothes get tighter, shorter, more modern, and less girly, which is part of growing up but also helps her storyline.
“They did have to form an arc, but Diana's style evolution was already in an arc that can be easily discerned when you look at pictures of her over the years. When Diana first came on the scene in the media, there was a juvenile nature to how she dressed before they were married. She was a typical young Sloane Ranger—the London equivalent of preppy. After the marriage, there was a transformation. Even the wedding dress had a girlishness to it. (I love the wedding dress, but it is kind of a young girl's fantasy of a fairy princess wedding dress.) After she had put a little time into that marriage, her style developed. At that time, she started working with [designer] Catherine Walker. She did not wear Catherine Walker exclusively, but I believe the majority of her public appearances were Catherine Walker ensembles.
“I think Walker did an enormous amount to define what we think of as the Diana style, but also, there was a collaboration between Walker and Princess Diana that catered to different variables. There were a lot of daytime appearances where Diana was very controlled and disciplined, almost hearkening back to the way that Wallace Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, dressed—sort of crisp, reserved. Then, Catherine Walker would create very fun and glamorous things that Diana wore for evening clothes with fascinating inspirations from history. Walker was extremely skilled at taking good advantage of Diana's form. And Diana being 5 foot 10, Walker made the clothes in such a way to really flatter and take advantage of that figure.
“As she got closer to separation and divorce, there were more opportunities for her to wear other designers, though she continued to work with Walker. Diana had a big love for color, even though many of her public appearances were in neutrals. When we get into the nineties, Diana made an appearance wearing Moschino at one point. It's not Catherine Walker, but Diana still maintains much of the look that the collaboration created, which often looked back to an elegance of the 1930s.
“Then, there's, of course, the revenge dress, which she wore during the separation. It reveals more of her body than we had normally seen from her before, which is why the dress got so much attention. And also, Diana looked absolutely fantastic in it. So it's with the separation and the divorce that there is another morph of Diana's style. When captured in her casual clothes, she no longer looked quite so much like a mother, as she did, I like to call it, the chic divorcee, almost a little bit like Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1970s. Diana wore more Versace as things went on. One of the things I remember very clearly from the year that she died was a really fabulous Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel suit in mint green that reminded me of the way Alfred Hitchcock often put blonde leading ladies in green suits in his fifties and sixties films—just a strange coincidence.”
Daniel Escale/Netflix
For anyone to see a royal, or at least someone who had just been a royal, in cycling shorts and sneakers, it's so jarring. Can those moments post-divorce get overshadowed by the casual ensembles?
“Given the degree to which the paparazzi followed Diana, we ended up seeing her in the press in swimsuits, tracksuits, and other things, just running to the store. With her character in particular, I don't think we're that surprised to see it. If we were to see Prince Charles running around in a tracksuit in the TV series, it would be more of a leap for us as audience members. Or if we saw the older Queen Elizabeth hanging out by a pool in a one-piece bathing suit, that would be a surprise.”
Diana has an interesting position between the traditional royal family before her and having her two sons come of age in a more modern era. Being younger, they’re likely not going to be as stuffy. She serves as this tipping point. Do you think there's been more casual-ification after her?
“That's sort of a yes and a no because I feel that Kate coming into the royal family has addressed her role as the assumed future queen, and she dresses in a style that is similar to Diana. It's a little less snappy and a little bit more restrained, but it's classic. And I think it maintains an arc of what we expect the royal family and a queen consort to look like. Meghan, as a former actress and social media celebrity, puts more thought into creating an ensemble that is intended to be eye-catching.
“As for the guys, they are aging, and they're aging with a level of elegance. They're consistently well-dressed. But because we saw them grow up in an age with more media than ever, we saw many more childhood photos of those two princes, William and Harry, than we did of Queen Elizabeth's children, Charles and Anne, and Edward and Andrew. We were more used to seeing them in casual attire as a general public. And because the paparazzi were constantly catching Diana, so were the boys, even though the press was given instructions to leave the boys alone to some extent. We saw them on the cover of People Magazine wearing their little kid clothes. So, I think that we just became accustomed to thinking of William and Harry as the sons of the People's Princess. They became the people's princes. So, I don't think there's been a big change. Margaret maintained the Margaret style until she died. Elizabeth went through several different designers over time, but she maintained her very solid look and had very few fashion faux pas in her entire life, which is really a compliment coming from me.
“One thing that my students often find a little disconcerting is when I show them pictures of Elizabeth in her uniform when she was in the armed forces and was Princess Elizabeth and was trained to be a mechanic. The kids see this picture of Princess Elizabeth in this uniform, and they're all like, ‘What? Who is that?’ A week later, they get to see a picture of her wedding dress and her coronation gown, so they have to process that. Same person, different occasion, different reasons.”
I read that they have a whole team in the costume department that's just dedicated to uniforms because I feel like that's the one space where you can’t mess around.
“Most people don't notice uniforms, but if you know what you're looking at when it's wrong, it's really wrong.”
Apparently, in one of the scenes, they dressed young William and Harry in jeans to sit with the Queen, and the show’s royal advisor later was like, “This would never happen," but they let it go because it was more of a dramatic effect.
“I do remember that. It was sweet. One thing that I think is nice in the last two seasons is where it shows Elizabeth developing this very close relationship with William, and of course we know that happened because Elizabeth was important to training William with what his duties would potentially be when he becomes king, but the show also emphasizes that they developed this camaraderie along with those meetings and the clothes show it.”
Absolutely. Do you think there are any fashion moments they missed in either season five or six from real life?
“I lost track because I got so caught up in the story. Of course, as a scholar of both Diana's style and of Catherine Walker, I personally might have liked to have seen a few more of the Catherine Walker outfits recreated and given a moment, but honestly, I was so into following the story, I was so captivated by the performances that I kind of stopped keeping score of when an important dress ended up in the story.”I
'm sure that's the biggest compliment.
“Yes, that actually is definitely intended to be a compliment.”
I'm so excited to see if there's any trickle into fashion these days. I feel like even personally, with things like pink button downs or double-breasted blazers or cigarette pants, my own fashion wheels are already spinning. I'm so curious to see if some of these iconic pieces like the Harvard sweatshirt will get another moment in the sun.
“It's interesting because some aspects of Diana's style in a way have never left us. I mean, she was the most photographed woman in the world from between her marriage and her death. And so whatever she wore, whatever style arc she had was so copied and absorbed by the public that so much of it just became classic. And I think of even in the 2000s or the 2010s, seeing an outfit on somebody and thinking,
‘Oh, that's kind of got a Diana style.’"
My older brother had a girlfriend in the mid-eighties who had what I later realized was perhaps the perfect haircut of the times in that if she used a blow-dryer and mousse she looked just like Princess Diana. If she washed the hair again, tousled it and put gel and spiked it, she looked like Pat Benatar. So many young women at the time, so many young women looked to Diana as the way to look. I hate the word icon because it gets overused so much. But Diana is iconic. We see her image over and over and over again. She is one of a short list of women of her time that I think truly deserve that label.”
I think it's so fascinating because there's so much evolution, too. When you think about her style at the beginning, she really goes through a lot of evolution. She became so classic right at the end, which I think obviously is also just a product of getting older and knowing what you like. What do you make of those last years where she does gravitate towards simpler pieces?
“She was gravitating a little bit more towards Italian designers. Since she was no longer an HRH in the last couple years, it gave her a little bit more liberty. She wasn't getting notes as much as to how she was dressing. And also she did not have the need to promote British industry the way she did when she was married to Charles. I think she was embracing aging very successfully. When you look at photographs of her in the revenge dress, she's no longer a newly married woman in her early twenties, which we saw so many pictures of. She is a fully adult woman who is channeling her sex appeal and is very confident no matter the situation. She knows she looks like a million bucks. And I think that's something that we see in Diana as she enters her thirties, she embraces adulthood. Her style gets even more sophisticated.
I'm curious in looking ahead to the second part of the season, do we have any semblance of the iconography that we had with the past episodes to work with, particularly in the realm of William, Harry or Kate Middleton?
“Well, I think Kate's wedding dress, which I believe was by Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen, is of course lovely. Kate and William's wedding with William in that red uniform. Moments like the one where they were driving around in a car were really charming and really appealing. William came off as being young and fresh in the way that he was carrying on the legacy of his mother.
“I think that seeing, mild as it is, some level of transformation in Camilla is a moment that might need to be shown because I think both with growing into essentially an older woman and the wife of the Prince of Wales, she kind of stepped up her style a little bit.”