Secrets of Diana’s Wedding Dress: Elizabeth Emanuel on the day millions saw her work

Princess Diana – then Lady Diana Spencer – had chosen Emanuel and her former husband, Welsh fashion designer David Emanuel, 72, to make her wedding dress for her forthcoming marriage to the then Prince Charles, now the King of England.

Elizabeth, 71, has worked with other members of the royal family, and celebrities including Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sharon Osbourne – but was in no doubt that this was a life-changing moment.

Often regarded the most famous dress of all time, with 750 million viewers tuning in to coverage of the royal wedding on July 29, 1981, Emanuel knew her creation was going to “become history”.

It’s why Emanuel, a self-proclaimed hoarder, has invited film crews into her Maida Vale studio to document the process of how she designed and created the famous gown.

New 5 documentary, Secrets Of Diana’s Wedding Dress, will feature contributions from Elizabeth and David Emanuel, members of their team, and archives of drawings, unseen personal photographs, and original fabric relating to the dress, which was made of ivory silk, pure taffeta and antique lace, 10,000 pearls, sequins, and notably had a 25-foot-long train that filled the aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral.

The dress captured the world’s attention and helped cement Princess Diana as a fashion icon. It introduced the over-the-top and romantic wedding trend, which still influences bridal fashion today.

What was the process of pulling together an archive?

“I wanted to keep everything [relating to the dress], every single sequin, every pin, because I’m so terrified that one day I’ll forget [about it]. So we got these big green trunks from John Lewis, and kept everything in there, including every bit of thread. I call them the royal trunks.

“We also took all these photographs just for us, to remember what went into this dress, because we knew it was going to be part of history. At the time, Diana was going to be the future queen. We felt very strongly about savouring this process for history.

“But I never really thought about making a documentary. It was only years later that I thought, because I’ve got this amazing record, including all the press books from 1978 onwards, I could track anything down in time.”

Eighties fashion, naturally, influenced the design of the dress.

“If you look at the way that we designed at that time, it all started from the Royal College of Art, where my bit of the graduation show was all lace and ruffles and very romantic,” says Emanuel.

“At that time, that look was very new, and it caught on, and suddenly that became the look of Emanuel. It was very much a representation of its time, that wedding dress.”

They knew for about three weeks before the announcement that they were going to design the wedding dress and “there were already a lot of ideas floating around my head,” she says.

“There was no Google – I don’t know how we coped without search engines – so there were trips to Waterstones, galleries, watching movies and everything that I’d used before in my design work. I gathered it all up and wanted to make something spectacular.

“It was a huge amount of organising. David is really good at organising things. I’m not so good. So the two of us had very important roles. I may have done the design, but the journey was shared by both of us. We wanted to make it a very British affair, and try and source English fabrics, ingredients, everything. And we were lucky.

“Wonderful people got in touch with us, like the people who made the fabric, Stephen Walters. We wanted to use English silk in the veil. Unfortunately, there’s only one place, Lullingstone Silk Farm, that had the silkworms, but there weren’t very many of them, and they managed to squeeze out a little bit of silk that we included in the veil.

“We were a tiny studio; it was sort of a real family affair. You hear about these designers doing royal weddings, and they have big teams and finances behind them. But we were a team of 11 or 12.

“And we were also creating outfits for some of our clients to wear at the royal wedding as well. We couldn’t just ditch them. They were really important to us.”

Of course, the morning of the wedding was memorable.

“We’d been so busy. Up to that point, we didn’t have a chance to get nervous or anything. But when we were putting Diana into her dress, it was then we started to think, ‘Oh my goodness. This is it. This is all the work we’ve all put in. This has to look wonderful’.

“I took precautions and thought I’d bring some glucose tablets in case Diana feels faint. I brought smelling salts, too. We made an extra skirt that we would have put over her dress, in case she spilt anything down it. I wanted to have a plan B for everything.

“It was incredibly exciting, and we could hear the crowd outside, which was brilliant. The television was on at the time, and we could hear, I think it was Judith Chalmers, the commentator, talking about what we could expect from the wedding dress. Everyone was waiting to see what Diana was going to wear. And the fun thing was, all of us inside at Clarence House, we all knew.

“We were just having a fun time. Diana was calm throughout. I was really nervous. David was calm and checked that her petticoat was on securely, and her train was fastened securely, so she didn’t walk down the aisle and leave it all behind. We wanted to avert any kind of disaster.”

Secrets Of Diana’s Wedding Dress comes to 5 on Saturday.