Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Costume designers Amy and Sidonie Roberts would know: On Netflix’s award-winning series, they’re the ones tasked with placing it there. Making vows—to God, to country, to staying married even if miserable—are kind of a thing on The Crown, which debuts the first part of its final season on November 16. In the four seasons they’ve worked on the show, Amy and Sidonie made a promise of their own: “Clothes, not costumes.”
That means delving into more than history books to dress the Windsor family—outfits have been inspired by everything from Lucian Freud paintings to Miu Miu campaigns. “I don’t think at any point I’ve sat there and looked at our work and gone, ‘Oh, it looks like a costume, it looks like a caricature,’ which it so easily could be with people like Mohamed Al-Fayed—a parody of something,” Sidonie says during a recent Zoom with both designers.
The duo, who won an outstanding-period-costumes Emmy for season three and were nominated each following season, leaned on this mantra when faced with their most daunting design to date. It was recreating the outfits that Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) were wearing on August 31, 1997, when they died in a car crash. “Over the course of the four seasons that we’ve done, I felt the most duty bound to do that accurately,” says Amy. “More so than the revenge dress, more so than Aberfan even, because of the sensitivity of the nature of that.” The outfits were made with precision to mirror the real ensembles “so that all the focus was where it needed to be,” she adds.
In fact, Amy and Sidonie were disturbed to discover just how many images existed of Diana’s and Dodi’s final moments. “As kind of awful as this is, you have them from quite a number of angles in terms of length of jacket,” Sidonie begins. “I mean, it sounds almost morbid talking about it like that if I’m honest, but you’ve got those images. But they’re kind of quite grainy quality. They’re from CCTV, a lot of them in the lift. So we were just able to think what [her exact look] might be based on her outfits before, the type of materials she wore, the kind of fabric.”
Diana spent many of her final days prior to the accident on Dodi’s yacht for getaways with her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. The season’s early episodes feature Lady Di’s enviable swimwear collection. “The swimsuit is the new ballgown of The Crown this season,” Sidonie quips. Some of the suits, like the blue one she famously wore while perched at the end of a diving board, were copied exactly. “It’s such an iconic moment, and it needed to be iconic in our story as well,” says Sidonie. “So we didn’t mess around with that all too much.” Others—like the patterned one-piece she wears while cheekily throwing ice cubes at her sons—were more spontaneous, made from silk ’90s Japanese print found in Paris with a matching sarong.
In one key scene from the sixth season premiere, Diana bargains with a boat of waiting photographers, telling them she’ll trade shots of her in a leopard-print swimsuit for privacy with her children for the remainder of the day. Diana’s clothing “was very much a tool, because she wanted the paparazzi to leave her and her boys alone,” says Amy. “So she went, if I give you this, will you give me peace? That was very much a tactical choice.” It didn’t hurt that the animal print made the front page during the same news cycle as Camilla Parker Bowles’s (played by Olivia Williams) lavish 50th birthday party thrown by Prince Charles (Dominic West).
It’s moves like that one that made Diana “persona non grata” in the royal family, as she refers to herself in the first episode of season six. But the show’s costume designers don’t think the estranged royal was necessarily using fashion to assert her relevance. “If she did, I don’t think that’s the story we’re telling in these episodes,” says Sidonie. “I’m keen to say that she was wanting to find her role rather than make a fashion statement. I felt at her death she was on the journey of [figuring out], what’s she going to do now? How can she use this incredible power she has for good? Which makes her death very poignant.”
Take a scene where Diana and Dodi go for ice cream in Monte Carlo. The costume designers debated whether Diana would have changed out of her bathing suit for the errand, or whether she may have hoped that she could go undetected in casual clothing and a baseball cap. “It’s almost testing the water of who she can become,” says Amy. But by this point, there weren’t many places the people’s princess could have gone unnoticed.
“Can she get away with going to Monte Carlo and trying to get ice cream and not be recognised? Of course she can’t. But she was trying it,” says Sidonie. “There’s very much this period—and very short-lived tragically—of her navigating a new life for herself.”
Amy also felt guided by series creator Peter Morgan’s writing. “[Her scenes] were all written in a more domestic, quieter context,” she explains. “So I think the tragedy is, where was she going to go? And it’s a question we won’t ever know the answer to.”
Diana’s devotion to a young Prince William (played by Rufus Kampa) and Prince Harry (Fflyn Edwards) is evident in the princes’ childhood style. The brothers are often dressed in matching polo shirts and chinos. “In Kensington High Street, I saw Diana once, and she was in a shop buying clothes for those boys,” says Amy. “So I’m absolutely convinced [she dressed them herself].”
When the boys age into young men for the second half of season six—when they’re played by Ed McVey as William and Luther Ford as Harry—their fashion sense evolves accordingly. “William is still William, but we know what happens to Harry, so we make him a little bit more subversive,” says Amy, complete with baggy T-shirts and armfuls of beads. Says Sidonie, Harry is to William as “Margaret [is] to the queen. It’s a similar relationship.”
Speaking of the long-suffering Princess Margaret, brought to life by Lesley Manville in seasons five and six, her closet gave the designers the most creative freedom. But they’re sworn to secrecy when it comes to revealing Margaret’s sartorial swings. “We can’t say very much about her,” says Sidonie. “There’s a big old lengthy thing we could say because it’s definitely her that has the most flight of imagination this season—her journey warrants that.” Amy chimes in: “Quite shockingly so.” (Princess Margaret died during the final season’s timeline, in February 2002 after a series of health problems.)
Another topic on which the pair must keep mum until the final season’s remaining episodes debut on December 14 is the long-awaited arrival of Kate Middleton (played by Meg Bellamy), whose headline-making collegiate courtship with Prince William thrust “a normal middle-class girl, wham into this funny old dysfunctional family,” says Amy.
Although there have been significant nonroyals to grace The Crown, like the Fayed family or Michael Fagan, whose 1982 Buckingham Palace break-in was depicted in the fourth season, none occupied as much narrative real estate as the Middletons. “It was just the injection of something completely different that we had not had on The Crown for any lengthy period of time. We inhabited that world for longer,” says Sidonie. Adds Amy, “There’s a lot with her mum and dad,” Carole and Michael Middleton, who are also parents to Kate’s siblings, James and Pippa (played by Matilda Broadbridge).
Kate’s relatively modest childhood home in Bucklebury, Berkshire was a steep departure from the gold-trimmed palaces and stuffy estates the duo is used to working with on the series. “We’re in a normal house—it was unlike any set that we’d had on The Crown,” Sidonie explains. “It felt strange and we had to acclimatise to it. It just felt like an absolute shift”—one of many that the royal family would face heading into its most modern era yet.
This article was originally published on Vanity Fair.
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