The wardrobe of the Crown Season 4, by Costume director Amy Roberts

 

'Charles is very stylish': how The Crown's costume designer brought 1980s to life

 

Season 4’s wardrobe includes Diana’s Cinderella dress and Thatcher’s power shoulders

 

Hannah Marriott

@maid_marriott

Fri 13 Nov 2020 14.38 GMTLast modified on Fri 13 Nov 2020 15.06 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/nov/13/the-crown-netflix-costumes-outfits-1980s

 

Composite image showing Princess Diana and Prince Charles (left) and The Crown S4 - Princess Diana and Prince Charles

 Diana’s dress at the Wentworth hotel ball ‘is kind of crazy, pure 80s, shimmery, slightly trashy, but it just moves so beautifully’. Composite: Anwar Hussein/Emics Entertainment; Alex Bailey/Netflix

 

With its power bouffants, sweetie-wrapper party dresses and alarming shoulder pads, some call the 1980s the time that fashion forgot. But in the fourth season of The Crown, which starts on TV tomorrow night, the era’s extraordinary clothing plays a pivotal role in bringing the decade’s stories back to vivid life. Some looks were faithfully recreated, while others were more loosely inspired by the actual wardrobes of the royal family, as the show’s costume designer, Amy Roberts, explains below.

 

Diana, Princess of Wales, Wentworth hotel ball, Australian tour

Prince Charles and Diana’s 1983 Australian tour took on existential significance for the royal family, coming at a time of burgeoning republican sentiment. Diana was strategically deployed in the charm offensive, photographed as a doting mother, with baby William on her hip, wearing a seemingly never-ending supply of photogenic outfits.

 

This Bruce Oldfield gown, in a shade of blue recalling Walt Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, represents the high point of a very successful tour. “It was a deliberate choice to put her in this,” says Roberts. “There is a lot of irritation going on, on that tour, but this dress was the moment you felt maybe they did love each other. There’s sort of romance and youthfulness. The dress is kind of crazy, pure 80s, shimmery, slightly trashy, but it just moves so beautifully at the dance, when it’s all breathless and exciting.”

 

The biggest challenge was sourcing fabrics with the specific weight and drape, and distinctive colour palette, of the era. This particular fabric came from London’s Brick Lane. Afterwards, the Crown’s “genius cutters” recreated the dress from scratch, “working out all of those frills – it looks like a lizard down the side.”

 

The Queen, played by Olivia Colman, at the Braemar highland games

The Queen was mostly seen in “sugar almond colours” during the 1960s and 1970s of series 3, but now looks a lot more sombre in greens and browns, showing that she has “settled into her life as Queen and matriarch, and has become that steady background figure in everybody’s lives.”

 

Composite image showing Queen Elizabeth II (left) and The Crown S4 - Queen Elizabeth II (OLIVIA COLMAN)

The Queen (played by Olivia Colman, right) is now a ‘steady background figure’. Composite: PA; Des Willie/Netflix

 

The bow on her blouse “is a pointer to Thatcher, really,” says Roberts, who tried to accentuate developments in the women’s relationship through their outfits. The handbag is a recreation of those the Queen famously carries, by Launer, with similar recreations created for Thatcher.

Those near-identical bags, as well as Thatcher’s pearls, show that she is “emulating The Queen” at first, something that falls away as the power dynamics change later in the series.

 

Princess Margaret, played by Helena Bonham Carter

“We just ran with Margaret, because we were dealing with the most extraordinary creature that is Helena Bonham Carter,” says Rogers, “so we went with the spirit of Margaret and how Helena was portraying her.”

 

This heavily boned swimming costume was inspired by corseted Rigby & Peller swimming costumes worn by the real Margaret, but its colour is fiction: all of Margaret’s clothes on the show occupy a “bruised” colour palette, reflecting a tragic stage of her life. “I look at my notebook for her, the samples of all her fabrics, and they are all sombre and strange.”

 

Composite image showing Princess Margaret (left) and The Crown S4 - Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter)

 ‘Sombre and strange’: Helena Bonham Carter portrays a tragic stage in Princess Margaret’s life. Composite: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images; Netflix

 

Roberts found Charles to be quite an eccentric, though elegant, dresser. “He wore beautiful pocket squares and handmade shoes – the lot,” she says. “I think he’s a very stylish dresser, actually.” Pocket squares can still be found in “those swizzy shops in Jermyn Street, though we would often find a fabulous piece of silk and make them” because the modern incarnations tend to be “less inventive” than “the beautiful paisley, natural dyed” versions that were popular in the 1970s.

 

Composite image showing Prince Charles (left) and The Crown S4 - Prince Charles (JOSH O’CONNOR)

 Charles ‘wore beautiful pocket squares, handmade shoes – the lot’. Composite: Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images; Des Willie/Netflix

 

O’Connor loved wearing Charles’ double-breasted suits, which he wears to pace around, looking stylishly stressed with his hands in his pockets.

 

“I often find that actors feel pretty fabulous when they put on a suit they would never wear in their personal lives. It always amuses me that Tobias, who plays Prince Philip, will stagger on set at some horrible early hour in an oatmeal sweater and trousers; an hour later he comes out in a suit and we all swoon.”

 

Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson

Thatcher’s wardrobe required “forensic, meticulous” construction, in order to create a version of the prime minister’s famous power shoulders that did not look like “a 1980s parody” on Gillian Anderson’s small frame. Anderson wore body padding, stepping into a creation which, she said, was “a work of art on its own, like a sculpture”. As for the clothes, “they were made to couture standard, with a lot of meticulous fittings and actors having to be very patient. Gillian would just zone out.”

 

Composite image showing Margaret Thatcher (left) and The Crown S4 - Margaret Thatcher (GILLIAN ANDERSON)

 The pussybow blouses worn by Gillian Anderson’s Thatcher had come into fashion as women sought an alternative to ties. Composite: Keystone/Getty Images; Des Willie/Netflix

 

Apart from one iconic moment – the PM in knife-pleat skirt waving from the doorstep of No 10 – Roberts didn’t make facsimiles of historical looks but “absorbed all the images”. The pussybow blouse, an enduring symbol of female power, had come into fashion as women searched for an alternative to ties to wear in male-dominated workplaces – the US vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, even wore one for her historic acceptance speech this week. Thatcher’s blouses were created from silk, mainly found in Paris, though during the course of the series any softness disappears. “At the beginning she was quite grey – she looked ordinary – and as she gets more powerful she drops her voice and looks more streamlined with padded shoulders.”

 

A turning point after the Falklands war was represented with “what we called ‘the Spock suit’, dark purple with wide shoulders, very militaristic, no hint of bows or softness.” She wears it in a meeting with the Queen, in which she is “bombastic – at her worst, in a way”.

The Crown Season 4 — a glimpse inside the wardrobe

 

Costume director Amy Roberts on the challenges and pleasures of outfitting Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen

 

Lauren Indvik  YESTERDAY

https://www.ft.com/content/3e49453e-8f33-4d43-952f-1a73c69cc5dd

 

The first time Prince Charles meets a 16-year-old Diana Spencer, she is dressed as a fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, wearing green tights and not much else.

 

At least that’s how it happens in season four of The Crown, which returns to Netflix on November 15.

 

Since its debut four years ago, Peter Morgan’s Emmy-winning period drama has bewitched audiences with its lush, intimate portrait of the Windsors, their daily lives playing out against the grand sweep and tumult of the 20th century. We can never know what the royal family say or how they dress out of the public eye, but Morgan’s drama is so persuasive we believe we do.

 

We reunite with the Windsors on the cusp of a new decade, in 1979. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister. Britain’s economy is contracting; inflation and social unrest are soaring. Prince Charles, now 31 and still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, is under pressure to find a wife. A war to reclaim the Falkland Islands — an event that turns the national tide in Thatcher’s favour — is only three years away.

 

At the eye of the storm sits the Queen, a role reprised for a second season by Olivia Colman. She’s assured, authoritative and rather sharper-witted (and sharper-tongued) than we’ve seen her in the past previous incarnations. She’s also funnier. Having borne the crown for now more than half her life, she’s mastered the job.

 

“She’s on an even keel now,” says Amy Roberts, the show’s 71-year-old costume director, who joined the cast in season three and won an Emmy for it. “She’s just there.”

 

Roberts and I meet on a late October day at a squat studio complex in Elstree, about an hour’s train journey north of London, where most of The Crown is filmed. The cold is biting, even indoors, and Roberts’ pale face and fluffy auburn hair are just visible over her broad black coat and pilled navy scarf, which she keeps on inside. Nine white-faced mannequins, dressed in outfits made by Roberts and her team for the Queen, Princess Margaret, Thatcher and Diana, are clustered in the centre of a vast room carpeted in industrial blue.

 

Roberts outfitted 252 actors in The Crown’s fourth season; a second team dressed the thousands of extras. With the exception of some worn Barbour jackets and Burberry macs for the Windsors, a glittering Yves Saint Laurent dress for Diana and one resplendent Missoni cardigan for Princess Anne, just about every costume was created from scratch.

 

“It’s about control, complete control over colour and mood and atmosphere,” says Roberts. “I always say it’s like a big opera for me; I just feel every character has a kind of colour palette. We do our research and it’s about going out and buying fabrics. You know straight away that’s the Queen, that’s Margaret, that feels right. I know that by finding [rather than designing] every costume I wouldn’t be able to put my stamp on it. I suppose that’s quite egotistical in a way; but that’s being a designer.”

 

Looking at the mannequins, I am struck by their richness and detail. No short cuts have been taken here. Dresses are buttoned, not zipped, up the back. What reads as a plain navy skirt suit on screen is patterned with a delicate tonal zig-zag. Despite the Emmy, Roberts is critical of her work last season. “I was floundering in season three,” she says. “I don’t think I particularly knew what I was doing. And I didn’t understand The Crown DNA.”

 

 

The Windsors are some of the most photographed people to ever step foot in public, and in her first go Roberts felt obliged to recreate precisely what they wore. “I wasn’t quite sure that it was okay . . . to get style and glamour in there. I thought you had to be just like the Queen, or just like Margaret, but you don’t, because [Morgan] writes bigger than that, doesn’t he, and you can dress them that way.”

 

That gave her license to zhuzh up the Queen’s clothes a bit this season: she describes a cardigan, silk blouse and pleated wool skirt as “Prada-esque”.

 

There are times where Roberts is faithful to the originals: the Queen’s ceremonial regalia, for example, and the clothes worn on royal tours.

 

Much of the anticipation for season four has been riding on Diana, the young, naive — but, as we learn, not totally guileless — aristocrat who becomes the glamorous Princess Di, played here by a 24-year-old Emma Corrin who looks and moves amazingly like a young Diana.

 

In early scenes, we see Charles’s grown-up Savile Row suits in contrast to her child-like clothes: a twee cardigan over pale yellow overalls; a floral dress and V-neck sweater with ballet flats; a blue dress with a sweet lace collar and bows. “I don’t like her clothes so much,” says Roberts. “She has no taste, no style at all. And then it slowly evolves.”

 

Once she is in the palace, the lines of Diana’s clothes become sharper, the fabrics costlier. A strong-lined custard yellow skirt suit is worn for a thorny lunch date with Camilla (Emerald Fennell); at home, a pair of smart black trousers with a white chiffon blouse tied with a velvet ribbon around the throat.

 

“[Diana] got a lot of grief when she was engaged and went to the palace, people complained [that it was a constant succession of] new outfit, new outfit. And she said, I had to, I didn’t have anything. She was going from a teenager into this extraordinarily rarefied world that she wasn’t cut out for,” Roberts says.

 

The most memorable look Diana ever wore was her wedding dress — a ruffled, pearl-embroidered, pouf-sleeved ivory silk taffeta confection with a 25-foot train, which in the series, we only see for a handful of seconds, from the back.

 

“That’s so genius, isn’t it?” says Roberts. “You don’t really need to see it, do you. Everybody knows that dress. It did make me laugh to think of all that effort.”

 

Once she is married, the ball gowns appear. Princess Anne (Erin Doherty) becomes jealous of the breathless press coverage Diana’s clothes stir up — though, to me and to Roberts, Anne is the real style star this season, with her smart equestrian clothes and silk Hermès scarves, worn knotted over her shoulders or under a tweed cap.

 

Besides Diana, the season’s other major newcomer is Thatcher, who is surprisingly glam in her bright, tailored coats and skirt suits with pussy-bow blouses, despite the padded bodysuits actor Gillian Anderson wears underneath. Her perfectly polished hair, clothes and jewellery are her armour for battling the press and her older, all-male cabinet. In being versatile and good value for money, they also hint at her lower-middle class upbringing — a pair of sensible navy Ferragamo pumps is worn again and again.

 

“That’s very much her background,” says Roberts. “She would have a suit with a knee-length skirt, and if she was going on after work to an evening do, she would have just [swapped it out] for a long evening skirt in matching fabric. It was a very good idea, very sensible.”

 

Thatcher’s wardrobe certainly has its limitations. For a bank holiday weekend at Balmoral, the Queen’s grey baronial estate in the northernmost stretches of Scotland, Thatcher and husband Denis (Stephen Boxer) undergo a series of social embarrassments, most centred around wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time: the pair arriving for tea in evening dress, when the rest of the guests are still in their muddy outdoor clothes; Margaret showing up for a muddy morning stag stalking with the Queen in an ultramarine coat and pumps, having failed to pack any outdoor shoes. “Say nothing,” the Queen warns her snickering relatives.

 

It’s about control, complete control over colour and mood and atmosphere

 

The Thatchers depart early, and Margaret proves a useful foil for Diana, whose weekend excursion is an audition for the role of Princess of Wales. “I only brought outdoor shoes,” she quips.

 

For Roberts, the most important moments are those involving the lower classes — such as Michael Fagan, the man who famously broke into the Queen’s bedchamber in 1982. His clothes are faded, worn — the kinds of things picked up from charity shops and not particularly well-looked-after.

 

“That was as important as Diana’s wedding dress to me,” says Roberts. “I spent hours doing that fitting. It was a courtesy to Michael Fagan and that whole group of people living that way.”

 

A costume director’s job doesn’t end with the clothes — persuading an actor into them can pose just as great a challenge. “It’s political with actors as much as anything else really,” she says.

 

This season, Roberts imagined Helena Bonham Carter’s Princess Margaret — depressed, divorced, her royal duties curtailed — in pleated skirt suits in muted colours and what she describes as “schizophrenic” prints.

 

Bonham Carter wasn’t a fan. “She didn’t particularly like pleats, and this became such a big issue. I remember one day making this impassioned speech about pleats, almost got to the point of being in tears about it, because I felt it was right, right for the 80s, right for the character. And she just lay on her sofa, and just shrieked with laughter and said, okay. And never ever did we hear a peep about pleats ever again.”