Emma Corrin has already described how everyone on The Crown’s set fell silent when she appeared in the recreation of the Emanuels’ concoction. The atmosphere at the moment Diana was changing into her own dress, was comparable: “We knew there was all this noise outside, but we got her ready in a small side room where it was just very calm and quiet.”
That fragility, ultimately, came in part from the way the taffeta crushed in the carriage that brought Diana to St Paul’s Cathedral. Not an eventuality which had been planned for, but the Emanuels managed to smooth it quite swiftly – all part of the charm of the historic moment.
Later, back at their studio, “it was an anticlimax. It was like giving birth and then a kind of postnatal depression.” Until they received a phone call from Diana, “thanking us for making her dress, that really made our day… she was meant to be on honeymoon somewhere. That was what she was like, so kind and sweet and thoughtful.”
Emanuel remains full of optimism about that day, and all of the ‘amazing ‘Eighties’ that came afterwards. If The Crown zooms in on Diana’s darker moments, then that is only refracted by the “happy, upbeat and bubbly” woman she remembers, who is also glimpsed. That one dress can symbolise that complexity? Well, all credit to the dress.
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