In my latest speaking engagement presentation, "Victoria & Elizabeth: Recreating Crowns & Gowns" (inspired by PBS' "Victoria" as well as the fabulous series on Netflix, "The Crown," featuring the life of Queen Elizabeth), I share design details about the real gowns plus behind-the-scenes stories of how the costume designers recreated those royal wedding and coronation gowns.
You can read The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride for stories about the "real" wedding gowns, but here's a little blurb from my talk about the recreation of Queen Victoria's wedding gown by costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt. (My PowerPoint presentation is also full of beautiful images!):
....................................................
{excerpt from}
"Victoria & Elizabeth: Recreating Crowns & Gowns"
“Victoria’s”
costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt, shared about reproducing the historic gown:
"We were able to source a lot of things, silk that was very similar to the
one Victoria wore, lace made by English lacemakers in Honiton. [The real]
Victoria was very keen that everything would be from her country and made by an
English dressmaker….,” the costume designer shared.
"The
wedding dress was the one thing we knew how it would look so [recreating] it
was a longer, drawn out process. Sometimes [for various costumes] we had to get
things done in a week or so, but [for the wedding costumes], we had several
weeks which was great," Rosalind explained.
In
an interview with Hello! Magazine,
she shared that “working with actress Jenna Coleman was a delight – and the
highlight of series one was spending weeks creating and perfecting the
all-important wedding dress…. “funnily enough” she added about filming the
wedding scenes, “it was a moving day for us….."
Costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt and actress Jenna Coleman at fitting for "Victoria" |