22 ★ FT Weekend 9 November/10 November 2019
Spectrum
where we find him in season three, not
quite an adult and trying valiantly to
make his mark on the world. “He’s flex-
ing his muscles a little, yet is beaten
back. Everything has been planned for
him. He’s like he is now, as he was as a
child. He’s much nicer-looking than one
imagines. But he’s suited all the time.”
Despite her commitment to capturing
the pageantry of history, or recreating
those ceremonial moments in which the
world (or, the UK at least) would stop
and look, Roberts’ favourite moments on
The Crown ere working on those scenesw
where the Windsors meet real life.
These include the off-duty moments
at Balmoral, for example, or when the
Queen goes riding with Lord Carnarvon,
better known as “Porchey”, in which she
shakes off the sugar-almond shades and
becomes “the woman she really wants
to be, in her lovely Burberry mac, fabu-
lous skirt and suits”, says Roberts. “She
looks knockout in that scene. Olivia
looked knockout.”
Likewise, the scenes when Charles
plays polo. Roberts relished the real-life
interruptions: “The crowd scenes,
where you get to see real people, and
pull in to the reality of the time. Doing
those scenes was an absolute joy to me.”
For Roberts, dressing the characters of
The Crown was also a reminder of the
curious theatre of being a Windsor in the
first place. And how each member of the
cast had to inhabit a role within a role.
“This job to me has been like doing the
costumes for a great, big opera, with your
crazy family, and all the ups and downs of
any family, in this sea of real life.
“The Windsors are more vivid, and
the Queen’s colours are more vivid, and
Margaret’s odd, sort of weird, Prada-
esque colour mixes within the real
world in their very strange way. That
was the only way I could do it, to see it as
an opera. But it’s terribly exciting.”
Most exciting of all, this series we get
to pry into Charles’s beleaguered love
life. “Eurgh,” sighs Roberts. “Dressing
Camilla was the hardest of all.” Why?
“Because all I felt about her was that
she’s a posh girl with no taste,” says Rob-
erts. “I know the type of girls, but
achieving it was massively hard.”
Camilla is introduced inThe Crown
earlier than Diana, whom we are
expected only to get a glimpse of in sea-
son four. “We meet Camilla in 1971,”
continues Roberts. “She’s just a teen-
ager, really, a child. But super-
confident. The kind of girl who isn’t
beautiful, but who men love.
“I dressed her in very short skirts. We
also tried her look with no bra — you
know that 1970s no-bra look, and how
posh boys love their nannies and all
that. Well, we went for that. And every-
body had a fit.”
Roberts may have been encouraged to
blow things apart but, in some instances
it seems, real life did intrude too much
on protocols. “They did leave me alone
on this,” says Roberts, of the very few
times in which the director sent back
word about the costumes. “But some-
times there’s a no. This time, the bra had
to go back on.”JoEllisonistheeditorofHowToSpendIt.
Seasonthreeof‘TheCrown’isonNetflix
fromNovember17I
t’s an unusually bitter day at
Elstree, the vast studio complex
that serves as base camp for the cast
and crew of the Netflix entertain-
ment sensationThe Crown. The
temperature is biting, and the air is lit
with frost.
On a frigid set, the actor Josh O’Con-
nor, dressed as Prince Charles in a tweed
suit and a spivvy cowlick, lights a joss
stick in a room designed to ape his royal
quarters. To his rear, a phalanx of cam-
eramen and stylists hover over screens.
The room, scrambled underfoot with
cables, feels more bike shed than Buck-
ingham Palace. But then the cameras
start rolling. Erin Doherty strides in as
Princess Anne. Her hair is long, centre
parted and shaped in the 1970s bouffant
style familiar to us from pictures of that
era. She’s wearing Go-Go boots and a
short A-line skirt.
She speaks in a prim RP that could
slice an apple. In the scene, Anne is teas-
ing her older brother for his clumsy
efforts at courtship. Who is he courting?
We don’t know. But we suspect her
name is Camilla.
O’Connor, perfectly awkward as the
young prince, blushes. Take after take.
Doherty delivers the same sneer on cue.
The crew shift quietly in their quilted
parkas, woolly hats and gloves. The arti-
fice of our surroundings notwithstand-
ing, I am transfixed. I’ve got a front-row
seat to the world’s most popular drama.
Whether delivered in primetime
interviews or parcelled out in fictions,
the trials of the Windsor family con-
tinue to enthral us. The British royal
family still commands the devotion of
millions, and for ardent monarchists —
and the odd republican —The Crown si
an indulgent manifestation of what has
become an international fetish.
Since writing the screenplay forThe
Queen, in 2006, the writer Peter Morgan
has built a multimillion-dollar career
based on his imagined adaptations of
real-life Windsor dramas; and his inti-
mate portrait of life inside the palace
has become an unofficial record of the
Queen’s six-decade reign.
The Crown will commence its third
season on Netflix next weekend with a
major recast of the main characters and
a significant shift in perspective. This
time around, Elizabeth II is played by
the 45-year-old actress Olivia Colman,
doughty heroine of the Oscar podium
and the embodiment of a cheeky-
Charlie charm that is considered deeply
endearing by the British public.
In the role of her sister Princess Mar-
garet is the more regal, quixotic Helena
Bonham Carter, while Emerald Fennell
plays Camilla Shand, later Camilla
Parker Bowles.
Focusing on the period between 1964
and 1976, this series will find the mon-
arch in the summer of her reign. But
while the drama could take in anything
from England’s World Cup win to Enoch
Powell to Watergate, all I can glean from
my brief on-set visit is that Prince
Charles is definitely dating. And that
everyone looks uncannily good.
The woman in charge of dressingThe
Crown his season is Amy Roberts, a 70-t
year-old costume director whose previ-
ous television credits includePrime Sus-
pect,CalltheMidwife nda JamaicaInn.
She arrived alongside the new cast
and estimates she has dressed about
8,000 extras for this series — outfitting
scenes designed to take us from flash-
backs of the 1930s depression through
to 1960s Beatlemania. She has also cre-
ated about 600 costumes from scratch.
A small but punchy character in a
mannish overcoat, Roberts presides over
a vast hangar of a warehouse adjacent to
the sound stages. Downstairs, racks of
soldiers’ uniforms and suiting hang
ready for extras. Upstairs, a workshop,
staffed by Roberts’ team of seamstresses,
cutters and tailors, is tasked with making
everything the Windsors wear.
Everything? “Everything for the
Queen,” says Roberts, as she leads me
towards a group of female mannequins
in full regalia. “All the Queen’s outfits, all
Margaret’s, all Princess Anne’s, all the
Queen Mother’s. All the principal royal
family, all the men, all made. All new
from scratch.”
We stand before the dummies and she
asks me to identify who’s who. I’m struck
by how outlandish the looks are: acid
bright in colour and often accessorised
with rather ridiculous bits of millinery.
I’m used to thinking of the royals as a
fairly sober bunch but these looks are
highly theatrical, and while it’s rela-
tively easy to pick out the slightly older,frumpier style of the Queen Mother, or
the form-skimming 1970s silhouette
preferred by Princess Anne, I get stuck
trying to tell the difference between the
Queen and Princess Margaret.
“Tsk,” says Roberts, as she bustles
towards a collage of picture references.
“You don’t remember the crazy hat
worn by the Queen to the investiture,”
she scolds me. “That’s appalling.”
Of all the duties onThe Crown, cos-
tumes is a tricky one. While almost none
of us has any significant personal rela-
tionship with the Windsors, or any real
clue what they do in their leisure time,
or any insights as to their actual beliefs,
we all know what they look like.
They are some of the most photo-
graphed people ever to walk the world
stage, and the royal wardrobe is one of
the few details we can claim to know.
Peter Morgan might imagine exchangesand encounters, and we are none the
wiser. The dresses and jackets and uni-
forms are a matter of record.
But Roberts was reluctant to make
facsimiles on set. If the first two seasons
ofTheCrown ocused on sartorial propri-f
ety, this time Roberts has loosened the
seams. The Queen of those series was
buttoned up in pearls. Under Roberts’
watch, she’s going to hit the 1970s in full
Technicolor.
“There are key moments, I think,
where you have to adhere to the facts,”
says Roberts of her attempts at histori-
cal fidelity. “The last two series were
very twinset. There was a formality
about it, I think, beautifully realised by
the first designer. But there was an abso-
lute accuracy,” she says. “I just felt with
this series, you could blow it apart.”
Fortunately, it turns out, what the
royals chose to wear in the late 1960s
and 1970s was often more bizarro than
anything Roberts could come up with
anyway.
Take the Queen Mother, who this sea-
son is played by Marion Bailey, a 68-
year-old actress known for her work
with the director Mike Leigh. Roberts
ran up a near replica of the acid-
chartreuse number she wore to the
aforementioned investiture of the
Prince of Wales, in 1969, at Caernarfon
Castle, replete with a halo hat encircled
with osprey feathers.
“The director almost wet himself
when she walked on set in Wales,” says
Roberts of the shoot, for which she also
dressed some 800 extras.
Not to be outdone, the Queen’s hat, in
pale yellow silk, was based on a Tudor-
era French hood, embroidered with
seed pearls; the teenage Princess Anne
wore an aqua mini coatdress, and Mar-
garet wore a coat and hat in raspberry-
sorbet pink.
“I’d never dream of doing that,
putting those tones together,” says Rob-
erts of their combined ensembles. “But
it’s thrilling. I do find the royal family
fascinating in how untasteful they can
be... But in a great way,” Roberts grins.
“She adds hastily.”
Roberts has a deeply irreverent
humour. About the royals, and about
acting. Of the cast, she notes that OliviaColman is the least interested in what
she wears.
“And I don’t mean that in a rude way,”
says Robert. “She’s not that sort of actor.
She’s completely instinctive. In fittings,
she wouldn’t want to know particularly
what an outfit might be worn for, or
what scene it was destined for. That
doesn’t mean to say she doesn’t care; of
course, she cares. It’s just absolutely not
her process.”
Helena Bonham Carter, on the other
hand, was very much involved. “But for
all the conversations I couldn’t really
say whether the interest was about Mar-
garet, or about Helena,” says Roberts.
“In my experience of working with
actors there are people who are instinc-
tive, who don’t really want to think
about the clothing at all. And there are
other people who are far more visually
aware about their body, what suits them
and what doesn’t, and the character
they’re playing.“Apparently, it was very similar when
Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby were play-
ing the roles [of the Queen and Marga-
ret, respectively]. Olivia and Claire are
very alike, and Vanessa was very similar
to Helena. I think that’s part of why they
were the right person for the job.”
Nevertheless, the roles have shifted.
While previous seasons found Princess
Margaret at her most vigorous and
voluptuous, the new series will depict a
woman well beyond the bloom of youth,
and living in the shadow of her sister.
The Queen, meanwhile, has grown in
confidence. How did Roberts try and
track the changes in deportment?
“I thought about the fact she’s been on
the throne for 20-odd years,” says Rob-
erts of finding the Queen’s character
through clothes. “And that she is settled
into being the Queen. And that the mar-
riage has settled down as well. And she’s
got children. You feel she’s on an even
keel. More confident. So I thought about
pure, clean, sugar-almond colours.”
Margaret’s look brought to mind quite
different attributions: “More victimy,
but more stylish. More wayward,” says
Roberts. “Margaret was the great
beauty. She’s now married. And the
marriage has turned toxic. I felt she was
bruised, bitter, lost... So, in my head, I
saw Margaret dressed in a palette of
aubergines, olive greens, petrol blues.”
Quite literally, she dressed her in the
colours of a bruise.
And what about the boys? “Often
they’re the ones that care the most,”
admits Roberts. “Some of the male
actors are much more vain than women.
Any hint of a tummy? Oh, golly.”
Even so, she adored dressing Prince
Philip. “He’s so elegant, isn’t he, beauti-
fully tailored, and [the actor Tobias
Menzies] is easy to dress. He’s always
stylish, and he looks good.”
Charles was less easy to unpick. “He’s
very old-fashioned,” says Roberts ofAs the third season of ‘The
Crown’ arrives on Netflix,
Jo Ellisontalks to the show’s
costume designer about
dressing the Windsors
‘I find the royal family
fascinating in how
untasteful they canbe... But in a great way’
Amy Roberts, costume directorThe Queen’s new clothes
From top:
Menzies in full
regalia; (from
left) Erin
Doherty as
Princess Anne,
Marion Bailey
as the Queen
Mother, Helena
Bonham Carter
as Princess
Margaret and
Ben Daniels as
Antony
Armstrong-
Jones; Josh
O’Connor as
Charles and
Colman as
the Queen
Des Willie/NetflixOlivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II and Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip —Sophie MutevelianNOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20198/ - 15:37 User: adrian.justins Page Name:WIN22, Part,Page,Edition:WIN , 22, 1