Princess Diana's Spare Wedding Dress Design Revealed
Princess Diana's wedding dress was instantly iconic—but it could have been dramatically different.
Diana famously rocked a puff-sleeve gown with a 25-foot train on her July 29, 1981, wedding day to then-Prince Charles, complete with antique lace previously worn by Queen Mary (Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother), as well as 10,000 sequins and pearls sewn onto the dress by hand, as well as into her veil, to give a "fairy dust" effect and sparkle as she walked down the aisle.
Her dress designer, Elizabeth Emanuel, said she and her team were instructed to keep Diana's dress strictly under wraps—and they even made a second secret dress just in case the gown's details got out.
Related: Princess Diana's Most Memorable Quotes
"The spare wedding gown was made just in case the secret of the real dress ever got out. Fortunately, it was never used," Emanuel told Hello!. "The dress was made in pale ivory silk taffeta with embroidered scalloped details on the hem and sleeves. Tiny pearls were sewn on the bodice." See it here.
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Like Diana's iconic wedding gown, the spare dress also featured a V-neck with three-quarter sleeves, but had a more subtle lace and ruffle trim than her main gown. The spare gown was made of silk taffeta in ivory and had scalloped embroidery on the ends of the sleeves and the hem.
Both gowns featured the gigantic full princess skirt and pearls sewn on the bodice.
Related: Secrets From Charles and Diana's Royal Wedding
Emanuel told Hello! of Diana's gown, "It was controversial and very new. There had never been a gown like that before, mainly because we weren't given any constraints and we were out of college and we just loved designing and flamboyance and were all into lace and frills and ruffles, and it was the age of new romance." The gown also had a hidden blue bow sewn into the waistband for her "something blue," as well as a golden horseshoe for good luck.
In addition to the entire spare dress, Emanuel created a spare skirt for Diana to have handy in case of stains, as well as a matching parasol in case of rain, though the then-Princess of Wales didn't use either.
Related: Charles' Heartbreaking Revelation to Princess Diana the Night Before Their Wedding
Emanuel also gave details of the measures she and Diana's team took to keep her wedding dress a secret until the big day, including some tricks involving trash.
"Our staff were wonderful and very loyal and didn't talk to anybody. And also because we had the dress, stored every night in a metal cabinet guarded by two guards," she explained. "So there was somebody there 24 hours a day, and we put shutters on all our windows, and we put false color threads in the rubbish bins because people were going through our bins."
For all the work put into the spare dress, its whereabouts today are unknown, even to its designer. "It was really just a back-up to the original and I don't know where it went," Emanuel said. "It just disappeared."
Next, Look Back at Photos From King Charles and Princess Diana's Royal Wedding