'The Crown' costume designer shares how she reimagined royal family's real-life looks for the screen
"I’ve never been so close to the legal team on a job," Sid Roberts says of the process for designing for the show.
Now that Netflix released its highly anticipated second half of The Crown Season 6, the show's costume designer is giving Yahoo Entertainment a behind-the-scenes look at her personal archives.
Sid Roberts, the brainchild behind Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana's iconic costumes on the show, shares her process for dressing the royals on the series with photos of her work station, which she shares with her mom, Amy Roberts, who's been The Crown's head costume designer for five seasons.
Using early concept photos, vision boards and lots of hats and brooches, Sid reveals what it takes to re-create the royal family’s most iconic looks. (Click here to read our in-depth interview with Roberts for more details.)
As far as first steps, Sid says it always begins with reading the script. Then begins “an extensive period of visual research,” which she and Amy transfer onto a board that’s “entirely covered in photographs” and fabrics referenced in works by Rembrandt and the contemporary British painter Rose Wylie, .
“Once we’ve absorbed all of this and we’ve really educated ourselves, now we go, ‘Who are we as artists, as creatives? What do we want to say? And how do we want it to look? We listen to music from that period, we look at street photography from that period, we look at fashion campaigns from that period, to give us a wider context of the world these people we're living in,” she explains. “The further back in time you go, the less people know.”
That may not be the case with the latest season, however. “The closer you get to now, the [critical] voices become louder. And if I’m truly honest, I had to nip that in the bud early on, because I think it would have paralyzed me,” Roberts says of the pressure of getting Princess Diana’s look just right.
As modeled by actresses Emma Corrin in Season 4 and Elizabeth Debicki in seasons 5 and 6, Sid had the job of dressing Diana from her teenage years up until her death in August 1997. Through rigorous research and a deeply felt sense of duty and respect for the late royal, Sid says she got to know a different side of the princess.
“I’ve got to grow with her, I’ve got to understand her tastes,” the designer explains. “By the time we got to Season 6, she was somebody I thought I knew. She’s just a woman with really cool taste that was going through all this s*** — I felt comfortable with her. I felt I could make decisions on behalf of her.”
That includes Diana’s iconic “revenge dress,” which she wore to a Vanity Fair party in 1994, on the same day then-Prince Charles admitted he was unfaithful in their marriage on a television broadcast.
It was the first time Sid put “any kind of royal member in black when it’s not for mourning or for a funeral” on the show, she says. While she wanted to create a dress as close to the original as possible, copyright concerns kept her team from going all out.
"I’ve never been so close to the legal team on a job," she says. Given that Diana’s outfits in particular are so memorable, she and Amy had to make adjustments in the details. Instead, she says the rule of thumb was to focus on "the essence of the outfit" that people remember.
The same philosophy was applied when designing such looks like Diana's wedding dress, as well as the famous blue swimsuit that she wore on a yacht, which ended up being her last vacation before her death.
"When you close your eyes, what do you think of?" her team would say in the early design stages. "What's the colors? What’s the feeling?"
There were two outfits Sid felt duty bound to be as authentic as possible: the coat and hat ensemble Queen Elizabeth wore after the harrowing mining disaster in Wales, in October 1966, as worn by Olivia Coleman in Season 3, and the outfit Diana wore on the night she died.
“For me, those are two stories that need to be just about that,” she says. “There cannot be an interruption or a distraction by somebody going, ‘Oh, god, that pearl necklace has got the wrong fastening,’ or ‘That dress length is too short.’ I felt far more pressure because of the sensitivity around the stories.”
Click here to read our full interview with The Crown's costume designer.
The Crown Season 6 is now streaming on Netflix.
