Clothing the Queen: recreating Victoria and Albert's Wedding

Dressing the Queen is never easy. Dressing arguably the most famous queen in British history? That’s something else entirely.

This year, I worked on the ambitious documentary Victoria & Albert: The Royal Wedding. It brought together an array of experts to recreate the most important royal wedding in history. The wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert changed the way weddings - both royal and otherwise - were celebrated.

Recreating the wedding dress

Victoria’s dress was iconic. It started the trend for white wedding dresses that has carried through to today. Before Victoria and Albert’s marriage, most people would wear a coloured dress. Almost straight after the wedding, white dresses became all the rage. Victoria’s dress was also immaculately simple. We might look at it and think it’s a bit fussy, but royal brides more often wore huge dresses encrusted with jewels, this couldn’t be any more different.

As you can imagine, projects like this take an enormous amount of research. I try to cover every aspect of the time, reading diaries and poring through all the records I can. Even if I think I know the period, I always refresh my memory and find new details.

After months of research, I had four days to create the dress. Victoria would have had an army of seamstresses working on her dress for weeks - I do love a challenge!

The most difficult piece to recreate was the lace, it’s notorious for taking a long time to produce. Even the lace Victoria used was already being made for a different dress, so it was easy for her to take it and have it altered. Fortunately I have a collection of vintage lace, which meant that I had a piece from around the time that just needed a little mending.

Oh, to be a guest at a royal wedding

I was there at the filming of the wedding. It was amazing to see the work of each of the experts come together. Everything from Albert’s uniform to the food served was brilliantly recreated.

Unfortunately I wasn’t a guest at the wedding, I was there to keep an eye out for continuity. From slipped hats to bunched up sleeves, my team and I were there to make sure everything ran smoothly.

The thing is, you can’t help but get lost in the moment. I was engrossed in the whole ceremony, watching with bated breath and losing myself, wondering how close we’d all got to the real wedding of Victoria and Albert.

Falling in love with costume design

I’ve always loved any period with stays and corsets. When I was young, I used to dress up in my mum’s long skirts and use her belts as a corset.

I think it’s because clothes are such a tangible part of history. They change the silhouette of the body, they make you move and feel differently. We forget that this was normal for people. They didn’t feel restricted, they were comfortable.

I always used to draw dresses as a child. I would draw the dresses from films I’d watched, like The Wicked Lady, and draw the clothes I thought the characters in books would wear. As a teenager I started sewing. I sewed everything by hand - mostly to convince my parents it wasn’t a fad so I could get a sewing machine. Although I didn’t study costume design at university I started creating costumes for the drama society before moving into theatre and TV and continuing from there.

Through clothes I can learn and tell stories from history. Dressing the Queen is totally different from dressing a Dickens character. In some ways the clothes of poorer people tell a story much more than that of the aristocracy. They have been fixed and patched-up, worn out and remade, they take the full shape of the wearer and tell their story. That’s why I loved The Hedge Cutter painting.

Victoria and Albert: The Royal Wedding airs on Friday 21 December at 8.30pm. Watch it on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.