What it’s really like to be a palace dressmaker

The mystery, the behind the scenes drama and of course the glamour – inside the reality of dressing the world’s most photographed women

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When a phone call came from the Palace in November 1981, designer Catherine Walker couldn’t possibly have known it would mark the start of a long-standing and intimate working relationship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
Nor could she have ever guessed what the role of a style adviser and couturier to one of the world’s most photographed women might entail. The mystery, the deadlines, the behind the scenes drama and of course the glamour, was a huge inspiration to me when writing my new novel The Palace Dressmaker, out Nov 5 and featuring ten real dresses all designed by Walker and worn by Diana.
Walker’s initial brief was simple enough; Diana, who was pregnant with Prince William, simply needed some maternity dresses. In the almost 16 years that followed, this new client would test Walker’s design skills with increasingly challenging commissions – she went on to provide the Princess with the “total care” she needed.
“I bought in lengths of every colour in every fabric,” the late Walker explained in her autobiography The Private Couturier to Diana, Princess of Wales. “I wanted to be sure that whatever I showed her would be in my hands if she chose it… on top of that I held double of what each garment would have needed for safety’s sake. I have known a cup of tea to fall on a piece of finished work and I didn’t want to let her down. Each sketch I presented meant a sizable investment.”
It was an understandably nervous start. There were no fittings during the Princess’ pregnancy and the first ten dresses that Walker made were too small, meaning they all had to be remade. A year later, Walker was fitting Diana at home. Then began twenty overseas tours. “I started letting her know where I was, leaving telephone numbers even if I was on holiday, making sure extra staff were always present in case of emergency,” she said.
During her first foreign tour to Australia in March 1983, Diana ran out of clothes. “A panic telephone call came through asking for five more outfits. There was a scanty brief and a timescale of only four days. Our principal machinist at the time literally moved into the workroom over the Easter weekend and slept on a sofa bed. She worked on the machine as I worked at the drawing board.”
In the mid-eighties, there was no formidable Angela Kelly figure – the late Queen Elizabeth’s personal assistant, who worked on the “dresser’s floor” of Buckingham Palace and managed the Queen’s clothing for more than 300 engagements a year. Kelly oversaw a “materials room” containing decades-old fabrics and kept detailed “wardrobe diaries” of what the Queen wore and to where. It was her job to know that the Queen preferred clothes that were fitted, not tight, a two-inch heel height and three quarter or full-length sleeves that were never crowded at the wrist. Handbags needed longer handles so that they never caught on her cuffs, handkerchief size changed according to the event and zips were preferred for speed.
Kelly would longlist five different looks for each of the Queen’s engagements before fine-tuning it down to three – the outfit she thought the Queen was most likely to wear plus two others for unexpected weather. She would diplomatically brief a guest list to ensure no sartorial clashes with the Queen and painstakingly researched cultural and religious requirements for the royal wardrobe.
The white dress and coat worn for the Thames River Pageant during the Diamond Jubilee, for example, was an outfit two years in the planning. “White was so important because I knew that on board the barge, the Queen would be surrounded by strong reds in the carpet, upholstery and canopy,” Kelly wrote in her book Dressing The Queen. She also oversaw the making of two identical dresses at the 2012 Olympics – one for Her Majesty’s stunt double as the Queen appeared to skydive into the Olympic stadium with James Bond. Both dresses were never out of storage at the same time, to ensure even the Queen’s family were surprised by the trick.
Walker likened such fashion research to “the days at school when I took exams. Would I pass? Had I done enough homework?”. When Diana asked her to design something for her historic meeting with the Pope in 1985, Walker herself went to the Vatican and spent hours in the library after interviewing officials for guidance.
The challenge for Stewart Parvin, who also designed for the late Queen over a 20-year period from 2000, meant creating his first piece for her – a yellow coat and dress worn on Maundy Thursday – without ever seeing her measurements. He worked from an existing piece until later toile fittings allowed for more accuracy. The look was loved and became the image that accompanied the Queen’s wedding anniversary cards to members of the public. “She loved my signature crisp shoulder,” he tells me now.
Parvin’s design sketches for the Queen were always created in full colour, with the chosen looks faxed back to him by Kelly, sometimes including annotated notes for design tweaks – a process that today would be more likely to happen over WhatsApp. His first evening gown was made with powder blue, cobweb embroidered lace for the Golden Jubilee tour of Jamaica. Kelly had chosen the fabric and Parvin was given three weeks to design and make a dress that other designers would need six months to create. But there was no working through the night.
“I’m more organised than that,” he says. “The stress came from worrying that when I saw her, she would look as good in the outfit as I thought she would. She only ever had time for one fitting – typically taking two hours for four to five looks – and clothes were never finished at that point but always tested under different lights.”
Parvin never used any fabric from his current collection to dress the Queen, preferring to work with suppliers Joel & Son who often only buy five or six metres, ensuring exclusivity. Everything was put through a crease test – literally screwed into a ball and then laid flat again.
Never responding to speculation around the late Queen’s clothing was all part of being a royal dressmaker, even when it was very wide of the mark. As was the case with the final green double crepe wool dress and coat Parvin made for her balcony appearance during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations of 2022. “Some people believed there was a microphone in her hat or that the black pom-pom was a symbol of mourning for the Duke of Edinburgh. I simply added it to match her shoes and handbag. I thought it looked chic.”
Bruce Oldfield who began dressing Diana in 1982 said the job was a “double-edged sword”, one that saw him spend ten years avoiding making statements about her. Writing in his 2004 autobiography Rootless, he said: “Even when [she] and I were splashed all over the papers together, we continued to say nothing. We still got dropped by her in the end though!”
Jenny Packham steadfastly refuses to comment on dressing the Princess of Wales today, a level of discretion that may have played some part in her now dressing one of the other most famous women in the world: Taylor Swift.
For Catherine Walker, the respect she had for Diana never faltered and the bond that the two women shared transcended that of royal dressmaker and Princess. She kept a replica in her archive of the last simple red crepe shift dress that Diana wore to her final daytime engagement. She was also chosen to make the dress that Diana is buried in, never sharing any detail beyond her final tribute: “I am still a part of her life forever in a way and a little part of me will be with her forever.”
The Palace Dressmaker by Jade Beer, Hodder & Stoughton, is on sale Nov 5
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