Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Costume designers Amy and Sidonie Roberts would know: On Netflix’s award-winning series, they’re the ones tasked with placing it there. Making vows—to God, to country, to staying married even if miserable—are kind of a thing on The Crown, which debuts the first part of its final season on November 16. In the four seasons they’ve worked on the show, Amy and Sidonie made a promise of their own: “Clothes, not costumes.”
That means delving into more than history books to dress the Windsor family—outfits have been inspired by everything from Lucian Freud paintings to Miu Miu campaigns. “I don’t think at any point I’ve sat there and looked at our work and gone, ‘Oh, it looks like a costume, it looks like a caricature,’ which it so easily could be with people like Mohamed Al-Fayed—a parody of something,” Sidonie says during a recent Zoom with both designers.
The duo, who won an outstanding-period-costumes Emmy for season three and were nominated each following season, leaned on this mantra when faced with their most daunting design to date. It was recreating the outfits that Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) were wearing on August 31, 1997, when they died in a car crash. “Over the course of the four seasons that we’ve done, I felt the most duty bound to do that accurately,” says Amy. “More so than the revenge dress, more so than Aberfan even, because of the sensitivity of the nature of that.” The outfits were made with precision to mirror the real ensembles “so that all the focus was where it needed to be,” she adds.
In fact, Amy and Sidonie were disturbed to discover just how many images existed of Diana’s and Dodi’s final moments. “As kind of awful as this is, you have them from quite a number of angles in terms of length of jacket,” Sidonie begins. “I mean, it sounds almost morbid talking about it like that if I’m honest, but you’ve got those images. But they’re kind of quite grainy quality. They’re from CCTV, a lot of them in the lift. So we were just able to think what [her exact look] might be based on her outfits before, the type of materials she wore, the kind of fabric.”
Diana spent many of her final days prior to the accident on Dodi’s yacht for getaways with her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. The season’s early episodes feature Lady Di’s enviable swimwear collection. “The swimsuit is the new ballgown of The Crown this season,” Sidonie quips. Some of the suits, like the blue one she famously wore while perched at the end of a diving board, were copied exactly. “It’s such an iconic moment, and it needed to be iconic in our story as well,” says Sidonie. “So we didn’t mess around with that all too much.” Others—like the patterned one-piece she wears while cheekily throwing ice cubes at her sons—were more spontaneous, made from silk ’90s Japanese print found in Paris with a matching sarong.