Princess Diana’s Iconic Wedding Dress Was Almost Quite Different & The Royal Had No Idea

Decades since Princess Diana and King Charles’ wedding in 1981 and her wedding dress is still one of the most memorable wedding dresses of all time. After all, in addition to being a wedding the whole world tuned in to watch, the billowing gown had a 25-foot train that made her look like out of a fairytale.

Reflecting on the dress in a recent interview, the dress’ designer Elizabeth Emanuel shared her biggest concern with the finished design. “I was a bit neurotic, and I thought, ‘What happens if somebody breaks in and steals the dress or something spills or there’s a fire or it gets stolen?’ ” she told People. “So I thought, ‘I’m gonna make a backup dress.'”

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So, while they tailored Diana’s dress to her wishes, her atelier also worked on a Plan B dress with a few differences. “I just thought, ‘If anything happens, we’ll finish it off and have it ready,'” she said.

Among the differences between the actual dress and the backup one, Emanuel said there’s a certain color variation. “[It’s] not the deep ivory that the royal wedding dress was made of,” she said, adding that the second design was more figure-hugging with slim sleeves “more fitted to her arms.”

If you’re reading this thinking Emanuel was too pessimistic to think the dress would be ruined or stolen, the dress designer remembered how hectic the late Princess of Wales used to be. “When Diana came in for a fitting, there would be hundreds of people outside waiting to spot her,” she remembered. “We had to put shutters up on our windows, and we used to put bits of fabric, in different colors, in the bins just to throw the journalists off the scent.”

Knowing all this, making a second dress is not only understandable but beyond smart too.

And while Diana’s backup dress, which she wasn’t even aware existed, was never used by the royal, Emanuel recently reconstructed it for an exhibit at the virtual Princess Diana Museum. “We never got to see that dress on Diana and thought it would be lovely to envision it,” Renae Plant, the museum’s director and curator, told the outlet. “You cannot put a price tag on history.”

Before you go, click here to see every time Meghan Markle reminded us of Princess Diana:

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