Elizabeth Emanuel: For the first time I’m able to say Diana’s wedding dress was my design
Under the pavements of Maida Vale, there is a basement flat unlike any other – two quite shabby small white rooms, full of rows of couture ballgowns; explosions of tulle and chiffon, bodices of exquisite lace, jewels and gold braid.
Mock military jackets line one rail, worn by Madonna on her Madame X tour. On a mannequin sits an Marie Antoinette-style waterfall dress of grey silk duchess satin and black tulle. That dress was made for the actress Courtney Love, wife of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who wore it to the National Portrait Gallery’s fundraising Gala in March.
As the evening wore on, Love was seen throwing her tattooed arms in the air, the black tulle ripped at the back from the partying. Who cared? The dress’s creator was Elizabeth Emanuel, globally known for designing Princess Diana’s ivory silk, taffeta and antique lace wedding dress, with 10,000 pearls and sequins and a 25ft train.
CNN’s Look of the Week declared the Emanuel-Courtney Love dress “the biggest and arguably the best gown of the evening”, and Courtney Love “a punk princess who had chosen to revive a name from fashion history”. The designer who, with her husband David had helped turn a shy young girl into a princess, had worked her magic yet again, nearly 45 years on: “she looked sensational,” says Elizabeth Emanuel at the memory. “I really, really wanted to dress Courtney. For me to have something like this worn by somebody like that? It’s a privilege.”
Clear boxes are stacked up on top of one another, towering above her, stuffed full haberdashery. “The stylists love it in here,” says Emanuel, now 71.
There are 50 sketch books bulging with designs and drawings. There is stuff everywhere: “I’m a hoarder, I’m afraid,” she says. Emanuel is a tiny figure in stature, although the dress that made the Emanuels – Elizabeth and her then husband David – is huge in both stature and legacy. Some 700 million viewers around the world watched the wedding.
“She radiated this energy and warmth,” Emanuel says of the couple’s regular meetings with the Princess before and after the wedding. The union began in secrecy: “Vogue magazine called us one day and said they were doing this photograph of a very famous person. It was the Snowdon picture of her but we didn’t know that then. Did we have something romantic and high-necked?”
The Emanuels salvaged the fabric from a dress that had been discarded after the client “got mascara over it” while trying it on.
“We trimmed off the mascara, the skirt became three quarter length, we made a little blouse with a floaty collar and dyed the whole lot pale pink. Diana loved it apparently. She asked who had made it and phoned us up one day. I was with a client. I took her name down for the booking but got it wrong. When she turned up and I saw who it was – Lady Diana Spencer – it took me totally by surprise. She was so lovely and shy. We made a few things for her and then we got the call: ‘Would you do me the honour of making my wedding dress?’
“I’d always thought to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful [if she chose us]’ but never thought she would. I knew in that moment of taking the call it was life-changing.”
Perhaps the dress was cursed, because the fortunes of Emanuel Couture followed a similar path to the royal separation in 1992. Elizabeth and David broke up in 1990 – worn down by mounting business worries and debt.
The split brought to an end a relationship that began at Harrow School of Art, where they met in 1974. The couple went on to marry two years later while in the middle of a two-year MA they took together at the Royal College of Art.
But their business and personal relationship totally fractured – and the discord has rolled on for more than 30 years. Since then, Elizabeth, designing on her own, has endured a series of business troubles, at one point losing the right to design under her own name until she won it back three years ago.
But a huge emotional blow hit her again during the Covid pandemic, this time dealt by David. Four years ago, he brought legal action against his ex-wife and a south London auction house.
David previously alleged that Elizabeth had infringed his copyright when she reproduced drawings she had made when designing Diana’s wedding dress, and then put those sketches up for sale.
However, on October 18, the pair announced that they had “amicably” settled the High Court case. Elizabeth hopes that the conclusion of this latest “horrible” episode will put an end to a rift that resurfaced with the launch of the proceedings three decades after Emanuel Couture collapsed.
“It’s been difficult for me since 1990 with David,” she says, “although the lawyers only started in 2020. But the court case process was really horrible for me, deeply upsetting because I couldn’t think of one reason why we couldn’t just have talked it through.
“Nobody [around me] understood his need to take me to court. Why would he start something like that? Nobody wants a fight in public.
“I was just trying to keep my studio going and raise some money. I was just trying to survive like anybody else.
“I just couldn’t believe that David brought this action against me. I had no warning. It came out of nowhere and he left me no choice but to have to defend myself. It was so upsetting because I knew that after everything I had been through this was yet another hurdle I had to clear. I really didn’t want to go to court to defend myself, and part of me felt very angry that he’d left me no choice.”
Emanuel’s particular frustration derived, she says, from an understanding that “when he walked away from the partnership because it was falling apart, he had left me everything.
“But now I want peace. I want to move forward to the next chapter of my life. It’s all settled. I wish him well, I really do.”
I ask if the settlement was a win for her, showing that the drawings had always been hers?
“It’s so important for me to be able to claim authorship of my work and for the first time to be able to say ‘that is my design. That is my work’, while acknowledging that the design is only part of the picture,” she says of their once fabulously successful couture business.
“David was much more sophisticated. He also did so much else, bringing these drawings to life in every way: meeting clients; telling clients off if they misbehaved; he was like a producer for our business. It took the two of us to actually bring the drawings to life.”
By the time of their split, says Emanuel, “I was ready for the marriage to end. He was ready for the marriage to end. We weren’t getting along by then. David had clearly had enough and just wanted to walk away. And so we reached an agreement that I would hang on to everything, it would all be mine, he would be free to walk away but I would carry the burden of the creditors.
“For me, it was worth it because I got to keep everything that I had made and designed. It wasn’t vicious. David wanted to start a new business but I have got to say that it left me with nothing [in terms of money]. It was very difficult for me because I was surviving on my own, trying to keep everything together and bringing up the children with David.”
They have two children, Oliver, who works in finance, and Eloise, a criminal barrister, both now in their forties. They shuttled between their parents and grandparents after the divorce and now “just stay well out of it. I think they look on us as being naughty children.” Eloise has a two-year-old son “who is wonderful.”
But the worry and stress of the last four years, on top of her business struggles before that, have taken their toll on Emanuel.
“I’m a bit low at the moment,” she says, her voice wobbling. “It’s been hanging over me all this time affecting what I do. I feel sad he felt he had to take me to court. I don’t understand.”
During this period, she says she has put on a lot of weight: “I overeat when I’m stressed, a lot of chocolate. I also have high blood pressure because of all the stress. I have suffered a lot. It’s been absolutely horrendous for me.”
She sighs. She smokes to help with the stress. She’s now taking Wegovy, the weight-loss drug, to try to control of restoring her physical health. She’s lost 1.5 stone already in the last five weeks.
Now, Elizabeth’s relief is palpable, although she still seems fragile: “Everything has been settled and I can go forward and be judged by my work.
“Now that I have got my name back, all the doors are opening for me again. I don’t hold grudges against anybody. I’m just a people pleaser. I like people to be happy. I don’t like to see people sad. But it makes you vulnerable if you’re a people pleaser because you always put yourself last, and you can’t advocate very well for yourself.”
“There has been heartache but you know, fortunately, it’s been a journey and I tend to remember more of the wonderful things that happen because they really were incredible. Designing Princess Diana’s wedding dress changed my life, but it made it hard to talk about anything else.”
A poisoned chalice in some ways? “Yes, I think it was, while still being a great honour. But I’ve done so much else. I still want to be relevant. I don’t want to be stuck in that time zone. It’s why it’s frustrating for me, a lot of the time, not to be asked about what I’m doing now.”
She adored designing the tomato-coloured air hostess outfits with their jaunty little red hats for her client, Richard Branson, for example, when he launched Virgin Atlantic: “It’s been a roller-coaster,” she says with understatement.
In 2018, Emanuel designed an outfit for Rita Ora’s performance on Strictly; a year later a dress for Priyanka Chopra for a Jonas Brothers video. She has also produced outfits for Tiffany Trump, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, Cher, the Pussycat Dolls and Michelle Obama.
Her latest idea is musing how she would design Princess Diana’s dress if asked now. She pulls out some drawings. Some of the dresses are streamlined, smart and sophisticated, mirroring how the Princess’s style was to evolve from her frothy wedding day look: “It’s just an idea at the moment,” she says. She thinks it would be better than the original. “The clothes I make now are much better made than when I did Diana’s wedding dress because I’ve learnt so much since, about couture techniques. It’s a challenge I want to set myself in a way, to see what I come up with.”
Tonight, she is dressed entirely in black, with wide comfortable-looking sandals over her socks, and a baggy black cashmere N.Peal sweater. As the weight drops off, she’s slowly starting to consider more streamlined tops for herself. “I’m feeling a little bit more confident about myself.” She still has her trademark multicoloured hair, which looks like a punk bearskin, and looks much the same as she did in early photographs when she shot to fame. The auburn and orange hair extensions are knotted into her scalp over her natural grey once a month by “Nacho”, her hairdresser of many years who flies over from Spain.
There is something very gentle about Elizabeth Emanuel. I can see why Princess Diana liked her so much. “I still get very nervous around famous people,” she says. “I’m in awe of them.” I can imagine her as a student at the Royal College of Art, when Browns bought her first collection, and she was burning with excitement having found vintage lace and ribbons in a Paris flea market.
Elizabeth and David were the first married couple ever to be accepted by the Royal College of Art for a two-year-master’s degree in fashion.
“David was very good looking,” she recalls. “I was amazed he wanted to hang out with me. I felt that all the way up until we got married in 1976.”
Even from the beginning, she’s preferred to stay in the background. “I was always so shy and I always felt fat so I wore baggy clothes. I didn’t like the way I looked. I had a perm in the beginning. And David was so good looking and outgoing. We made this perfect partnership.”
She takes me over to one of two big computer screens in the back room, near the patio doors leading to the garden. “I’ve got to have a puff.” She picks up her box of cigarettes and goes into the garden. Don’t mind me, I say. “Oh no! I can’t smoke near the dresses.” She treats them like friends. The make-do ashtray is full of butts: “I smoke when I’m stressed.” She pushes Nacho’s copper extensions out of her eyes.
At the computer, she runs through her contribution to 20th-century film, music and fashion, moving – finally – into the 21st century, too: “Elizabeth Hurley for Estee Lauder…I’ve got that dress somewhere….and that dress I think is in the V&A now….and there’s Lulu, she’s my neighbour down the road, oh and look, there’s Ivana Trump and here’s Paula Yates and there’s Jack Nicholson and that’s Bianca’s divorce wardrobe, we did when she went to court….Patsy Kensit, Shakira Caine, Helen Mirren, Daryl Hannah, Charlize Theron…”
In some of the pictures, there is a little grey-haired lady hunched over a sewing machine. Who’s that? “My seamstress Rose.” There was Nina too, “hard at work making everything.” Where are they now? “Everybody’s passed, really,” she says, “it’s very sad.”
Of everybody she has met over the years, she says it is Bianca Jagger, Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor who have shone with some kind of inner star quality: “When Bianca walked into a room, everybody would stop and look at her.
“Diana was a light giver... There was something about her that you just felt…this was somebody beautiful.”
Elizabeth Taylor kept the Emanuels waiting for three hours in a sparse room in Paris “with this little guy”. It was Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director and politician.
Apart from the dresses, it is her children who keep her going. Her own late parents, Buddy Weiner, a wealthy American businessman, and her English mother Brahna, gave her a lovely life in Hampstead and in Berkshire and put her own children through private school when her marriage broke up.
Her father had set the Emanuels up in business and backed them for a long time, but by the time of the divorce and with the business in difficulty, even he ducked out, siding with David, unable to understand why she wouldn’t throw in the towel too. For a while after their split, she lived on a houseboat, during which time she met her current partner, Tony Drew, a playwright. They have lived together “on and off over the years”.
Perhaps given the new status of reconciliation, Emanuel is diplomatic about the fact that it was David, rather than her, who consulted on The Crown Netflix series, in which Emma Corrin, who plays Princess Diana, wore a replica of the Emanuels’ wedding dress.
She found out at the last minute: “I didn’t know anything about it until it was about to be broadcast. It was surprising nobody had said anything to me, but hey, such is life. I watched it. I loved The Crown. It’s all water under the bridge now.”
As well as planning a memoir, there are a couple of other “big projects” in the pipeline about which she is sworn to secrecy: “Honestly,” she says, “It’s been an adventure and even though I’ve had the rough stuff, in a way I wouldn’t change it because I think it’s helped me creatively do what I do.”
Elizabeth Emanuel might have started in Mayfair and ended up in a west London basement but there is something rock and roll about her now, in her eighth decade. I suspect there was always a punk behind the princess. It might have taken four decades, but at 71 she’s been able to finally break free.