left) and her mother, Cora Crawley
(Elizabeth McGovern, below right),
wear vintage pieces, adapted and
embellished by Robbins and her
team for a pivotal ballroom scene.
“For Mary, we used a French
beaded gown from a vintage trader
that we painstakingly added beading
to in order to make it floor length,”
says Robbins. She accessorized with
a tiara made with Swarovski crys-
tals. (Of course, for Violet Crawley
[Maggie Smith], crystals just wouldn’t
do: Her tiara, a 19th-century platinum-
and-diamond number from Bentley
& Skinner of Piccadilly, contains
16.5 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds.)
As for mama Crawley, the gown
Robbins found at a vintage shop
in Paris was originally a very un-
Cora turquoise. Robbins had it dyed
to a lilac mauve before adding two-
tone chiffon from London’s Joel &
Son Fabrics for its floating sleeves.
“The whole thing came together
beautifully,” says Robbins. “Cora
wears this shape really, really well.”
In other words: yas queen.b byDowntonFor the series’
big-screen
debut Sept. 20,
the Crawley
ladies pull
out all the
sartorial stops.
BY ROSY CORDERO
CLOSET CONFIDENTIAL
WHAT TO WEAR WHEN THE KING
and Queen of England come for
a visit? That’s just one of the ques-
tions that sends the residents
and staff of Downton Abbey into
an aristocratic tizzy in the new film
version of the hit PBS series. Luckily,
the film’s costume designer, Anna
Mary Scott Robbins, had access
to a wealth of gorgeous art deco
clothing and jewelry—the film is set
in 1927—some of which had royal
bloodlines of their own.
Robbins worked very closely
with John Bright from London-
based Cosprop, which specializes
in historical finery. “John has some
pieces of Queen Mary’s actual
wardrobe in his archives that we
were able to analyze to look at
the construction and detail,” she
says. In fact, Geraldine James, who
plays the Queen in the film, wears
a dress made from fabric that was
actually worn by the real-life royal.
Her majesty isn’t the only one
wearing history on her sleeve: Lady
Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery, below↘ “The detail
and scale of
the costume
itself is so
much bigger
[for film],”
says costumer
Anna Mary
Scott Robbins.
‟So my quality
control had to
be even higher
than it was on
the series.”↖ Lady Violet
doesn’t do fake
diamonds