The Royals with Roya and Kate - Royal fashion: From hand-me-downs to glamorous gowns

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Roya and Kate get a sneak preview of the Dress Codes exhibition at Kensington Palace as they discover the untold stories behind iconic outfits from the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, including the evolution of Queen Victoria mourning dress codes and Princess Diana's bold style. Dress Codes exhibition is on until the 30th November 2025. This weekend The Times and The Sunday is free to read - visit thetimes.com  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello and welcome to The Royals with Roya and Kate. I'm Roya Neekar, Royal Editor for The Sunday Times. And I'm Kate Mancy, Royal Editor for The Sunday Times. And I'm Kate Mansie, Royal Editor

for The Times. We've stepped outside our studio at The Times today and we've ventured to Kensington Palace. You can probably hear the birds and crows singing on this idyllic spring morning. And we're here on the edge of Kensington Palace Gardens right in front of this historic palace where Queen Victoria was born in 1819. It was home to the late Princess Diana. And of course today it's the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales and their children. It's fair to say that the walls of this palace behind us hold a lot of history.

Today, we're gonna look at that history through a different lens, through the lens of royal fashion. And our podcast has been given exclusive access to the palace to look at some amazing outfits from the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collections. Each of them tells a very unique story about the wearer and the time in which it was worn.

Should we go and have a look? Yes. So we're here inside the palace walls and at the Dress Code exhibition where it says we can see the powerful impact fashion can make when boundaries are pushed and dress codes evolve. Around us a piece is worn by young Queen Elizabeth, Diana, Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret, Queen Victoria and one Dame Vivienne Westwood, the punk designer who brought London alive in the 70s and 80s. And with us to explain it all is Matthew Storey, curator of dress codes, and you have put the whole thing together.

Tell us a bit about the dress codes exhibition, Matthew, please. Hi, thank you for having me. The dress codes exhibition at Kensington Palace celebrates the collection I look after every day, which is the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, which is cared for by historic royal palaces. It's a collection of about 10,000 items of clothing worn at the royal court or by members of the royal family, and lots of archives are part of that to support the study. And we hadn't had an exhibition that just focused on the collection for many years. We've put it, pieces of it, in lots of our exhibitions over the last few years. We thought it was about time to really celebrate what we care for and we thought how can we find a theme that

pulls all those pieces together, all those stories together and it's actually working with young people's groups who we invited in and we collaborated with them to create the exhibition, young producers aged 14 to 17. And what was really important to them was thinking about why you wear the clothes you wear. So there's a lot of young people's involvement in bringing this together as well. It was an absolute joy working with young people. They were so smart, so creative, so engaged. Terrifying. Yeah, because I don't often work with teenagers.

I'm not a teacher. I'm usually with my collection or in my archive. No, I mean how smart they are, yeah. Oh, yeah, terrifyingly smart, completely. And it was just a joy, just a joy working with them. And for them, thinking about what you communicate through your clothes was so important. And it's a theme everyone can relate to. So them thinking about what you communicate through your clothes was so important. And it's a theme everyone can relate to.

And that, because we all get dressed every morning. And so that seemed a great way to choose these pieces in the Dress Codes exhibition, to organize them around different themes about different dress codes. And that's so pertinent to royal and court dressing. Matthew, this exhibition took three years to sort of put together.

Can you talk a little bit about how you selected what was gonna go in? I mean, what was the story you wanted to tell? And also, what are the key challenges for this kind of exhibition? Do you have to think about conservation, preservation, when you're thinking about what you choose and the story you want to tell with the outfits.

I wanted to represent a real breadth in the collection. You could think that a collection of royal and court clothing was just about clothing worn by princes, monarchs, courtiers. So in the dress code exhibition, you'd be able to see clothing worn by all of those people, but also clothing worn by people who work in the Royal household, members of the public wanting to celebrate a royal occasion.

So I wanted to look at the whole of society where I could in the exhibition. I wanted to get international representation in there. So you'll see the two dresses which haven't been shown at Kensington before, worn by Princess Margaret, were both made by designers who brought, in one case, Middle Eastern culture into her designs. That's Thayer Porter and Jose Peto Moreno, the Philippines' greatest couturier

who brought Filipino influence in. That seems so right for London, for our group of young Londoners to look at global cultures. And then of course we had to have our favorite pieces, our big hitters. So that in some cases that was people who have a direct connection to Kensington Palace. So Diana, Princess of Wales lived here, Princess Margaret lived here. Queen Victoria was born here and so it feels so right to bring their iconic wardrobes back into the palace. And the exhibition is called Dress Codes, which is a great name. Can you tell us why dress codes were so important and continue to be for the royal family?

For the royal family and for the royal court, clothing has often been very codified, whether that's by convention and society, sometimes written regulations. So if you were a woman, say, coming to court in the late 19th or early 20th century for a court presentation in the era of the debutantes, you couldn't just turn up in what you wanted. You had to wear a piece of clothing that was absolutely strictly conformed to the rule set out by the Lord Chamberlain's office in a book called Dress for Warn at Court. Your train had to be fastened at your shoulders. It couldn't be more than about 18 inches along the ground.

You had to have three ostrich feathers in your hair. Were these things policed in any way? Yes, in the ante room before you were presented to the for King Queen, they made sure you were dressed correctly. So literally sometimes you had a written in false dress code. Obviously uniforms as well. Lots of people dress up in uniform every single day for work. That's not clothing they've chosen, but it's clothing that's been set for them. We've got some uniforms here as well. Stunning uniforms actually.

So that codified dressing seemed really important and then you've got more personal dress codes as well. So members of royal family they will wear ceremonial clothes which will have regulations or long traditions behind them but they also sometimes have their own personal dress codes as well. So someone like the Duke of Windsor, he had a whole philosophy which he called dress soft and that informed all his clothing. It was his philosophy, it was his own personal dress code. Dress soft, something a bit more informal.

A bit more informal, it looks very formal today, but if you compare it to what his father was wearing. Some of the suits here that you have of Duke of Windsor look like something that might be worn today. And that's because he, the fashion coach, he said... He was a trendsetter, wasn't he? He was a trendsetter. He left behind a lot of the, say, formality of the Edwardian era. Start shirts and trousers worn with braces and loved these soft, rich country fabrics.

Braced the American style a bit more. American style trousers, which his own tailor wouldn't make for him, so he had to go for a different tailor. So dedicated was he to dressing according to his own codes, his own sense of what was comfortable and his own taste. That sort of gives you a little bit of an indication that he was going to become a bit of a rule breaker and do things slightly differently.

Could we have read through his dress codes that he was going to abdicate Matthew? Were the signs there in the dispatch of the braces into the belts? Rather, you've got that informality actually, and he was very popular for that at the time. When he was Prince of Wales, people looked at what he was wearing. Making bold decisions. Making bold decisions and be more informal. Similarly with Princess Diana's outfits that you have here, something a bit more bold, something more creative than perhaps we were used to from senior members

of the Royal Family before her. Well she always dressed perfectly, I'd say, Diana Princess was perfectly for every event. She absolutely knew what was appropriate for evening wear, for a daytime duty, for an official overseas visit. So that beautiful red Bruce Oldfield dress we've got open in the exhibition with its gorgeous embellishment, its full-length skirt. It's a beautiful piece to wear for a formal dinner but with a high neckline and long sleeves it was absolutely appropriate to the culture of her hosts in Saudi Arabia. But she brings a real enjoyment of design and seeing what her designers can create for her. And so I think that's where you get that with Diana Princess of Wales.

She loves trying new styles, thinking, oh, if I wear this, what are they going to say? And she read her press, so she did actually learn what happened when she tried something new, whether it had worked or not. Interesting. So do please show us around. My pleasure, come along. So Matthew, this is a wonderful wall of different prints

where we can actually touch and feel some of the fabrics that are in the exhibition and talk us through some of how royal fashion and dress codes evolved. So can you tell us a little bit about what we can see and what people can come and feel and touch? Well so often in museums the sign says, please don't touch, so we thought we'd have a room where it was, please do touch. That was really important. So these are modern samples. Obviously we can't put the historic pieces out to be touched. We have to be touched.

We have to be so careful of our historic garments. So we got as close as we could with modern materials to the pieces in the exhibition. So people can get that extra sense of clothing because of course seeing an item of clothing in a glass case only gives you part of the story. Clothing is designed to be touched. It's that shopping experience, isn't it?

Walking around the shop and having a little feel and you can actually do that. Very tactile part of the exhibition. That's how I shop. I like to run my hand along. So especially if you're shopping vintage, the fabric is so important to get right. And so that's what we wanted to do at Kensington Palace in this display. So we've got, I mean, one of my favourite sections is here, the uniform wall. How often do you actually get to feel what gold raised work embroidery is like? And it's so tactile. So this is the type of embroidery you get on uniforms.

So this is green wool with a kind of gold leaf embroidered on the top. Gold leaf embroidered. And where would this be used? So this is worn on ceremonial uniforms and with the gold embroidery. And the gold embroidery is tactile because what you have is these gold threads which are laid over a padding.

So it's three-dimensional and it shines. And it's all that hand-stitched, presumably, with the gold thread. All of it's hand-stitched. And then gold lace as well, which looks more like a braid, but we went with a technical term, which is lace, which is woven in an oak leaf pattern.

And that usually goes up, it's a gold strip that goes up the side of trowel legs on ceremonial. And there would have been hundreds of these produced, presumably, for the soldiers. And still made today, and there's still manufacturers and tailors who create, say, or in the same style, because it's that tradition and continuity that's important. And so we sourced these pieces from the suppliers they use.

So this is absolutely authentic. So you get a sense of what metallic braid actually feels like, this shiny gold. And here we've got a wall of sort of patterns. So we've got Liberty floral print up there. And I know we're going to look at some dresses that belong to the young Elizabeth and Margaret. And down here we've got tartan, which is very important to the history

and heritage of the royal family. What tartan are we looking at here? This is a Rosset tartan. Ah. So- That's the tartan that we see in there with the Duke of Windsor's suit. Exactly, because... Who was Duke of Rothesay as Prince of Wales, of course.

He was, so that's why he actually inherited that suit from his father. It's an 1897 suit which George V had worn when he was Prince of Wales and then Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor, inherits it and adapts it. So this is a modern Rothesay tartan, but in real world. We used to see the King in that tartan a fair amount when he was the Duke of Rothesay. We don't however see the current Prince of Wales in tartan ever.

We don't see him in a kilt very much. We don't see him wearing, we never see him in a kilt. I should like to. It's a very different act taken by father to son. And that, but I suppose that speaks to the evolution of dress codes. King Charles was very keen on wearing tartan, he still is. His son not so much. Prince of Wales yesterday was in his trainers

on a football pitch. So again, every generation, you see the sort of maybe, more informal. There's a long history of tartan for our family. Prince Albert even invents his own royal tartan, Balmoral tartan. So it's a long tradition, but you still see it going on. And I think these rich wool fabrics would have really appealed to the Duke of Windsor in particular. So not just tartan,

but there's a sample here of a houndstooth tweed in two shades of brown in what you traditionally think of as a country fabric. But of course he popularised... You can see the Queen in that in Balmoral, can't you, going for a picnic. He popularizes wearing it in town, of course. So that's one of his innovations, because he loves these traditional fabrics so much. He wears them in settings they wouldn't normally

have been set in, helping to set that trend. We've also got on this wall, you wouldn't necessarily expect the day wear, which is black lace and black silk, but I know we're about to go and look at something that Queen Victoria wore a lot of in those fabrics, which is her morning dress. And that's the iconic look for Queen Victoria,

black on black, and I mean, how stylish can you be wearing different shades and textures of black? We think of Queen Victoria as looking very dowdy in her morning, not at all. There's a lot of style going on there as well. So we've had a feel, we've had a little look at some fantastic fabrics. Should we go and actually see some of the outfits now?

Sworn by iconic dresses from the royal family. Great, let's go and have a look. Perfect. So I'm looking at a black bodice and it's a little sign saying it's Queen Victoria's bodice and it's dated to about 1870. You can see a little shiny what appear to be beads on the bottom there. Can you tell us about this Matthew? This is really very old piece and fascinating to look at.

This is a very rare piece indeed and I've been waiting a few years to put it on display for the first time so it's never been seen before. Why is that? Well I only acquired it in I think 2018. Okay, from where? At auction. Okay, how much did it cost? Oh I can't remember right now. I think I looked this up after we spoke, I think it was eight and a half thousand, does that sound right?

That sounds about right, yeah. Yeah. There were three of them that came up at auction and I just spent months and months and months studying Queen Victoria's clothing, as many examples as I could around the country and in fact around the world and there was a big gap in survival that I found. So lots of clothing from early in her life before her widowhood in 1861 and lots of clothing in museum collections all over the place at the end of her life dating to the late 1890s.

But the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were almost absent from the record of clothing that had survived. Then I get a call from an auctioneer saying, I've got three Queen Victoria bodices. I think one's 1870s, one's 1880s, the other's 1890s. So this is your dealer, somebody you know, you've known for a while. You get a tip off and you head down to the auction house. Do you have to ask your boss for cash first? I did have to ask. To see how much is in the piggy bank. How high can I go?

I asked for a lot of money because I knew how these were important. My boss didn't let me have quite as big a budget as I wanted. So I had a very nerve-wracking auction, where the auctioneer was um she kept talking it up going to the everybody This is very rare indeed. I've got any more bits in the room. It's online Quiet, please and luckily We did have a big enough budget and I managed to acquire all three for the Royal Ceremonial dress collection I really did just fill in that gap her black morning wear

Victoria's, is so synonymous with her identity, because of course we've had, you know, films and TV series and adaptations about her young life, young Victoria, of course, being one of the most famous ones about the love story between her and Albert. But really, when we think about photographs

that exist of her and film footage, it really is all her in her mourning dress. So why, talk us a little bit about why that was so important to her identity and how that evolved over the decades where she was mourning. The interesting thing is it barely evolved at all. So she becomes a widow at the very end of 1861 and starts wearing black.

And at the time, there were very strict rules and conventions in society about mourning. So widows would have been expected to wear the very darkest black clothing for the first year in a day at least. You didn't want to come out of that first stage too quickly, it would have been unseemly. And if you look at this bodice,

you've got two triangular panels running all the way down the front of this very dark fabric, and that's crepe and Huge amounts of crepe is produced by Manufacturers of morning clothes and why was it? Why was crepe used? It's got this crinkly texture and it's it's treated silica wool to give it this crinkly texture And it actually the effect of that texture is it absorbs the light and you can see here on this bodice, the contrast, you've got the silk which is a much shinier but the crepe looks totally dull so for that first year or so

of mourning widows would have worn just a huge amount of crepe on their clothes so they would have really, their clothing was as dark and as sombre as it could be. So widows at the time conventionally were expected to be in morning dress for a year. That's just the beginning. Right. And then. Because Victoria went on for a very long time.

She never really came out of it, did she? And then you could go on to second stage morning where you could have less crepe and sparkly embellishments. Right. And you can see the sparkles on this one. So that's what we're seeing on this bodice. So this wasn't the first year of mourning. This is obviously later on.

Much later. And then you could. You're allowed to be a bit jazzer. There was an exit strategy. You could have done half mourning, which was white and mauve. Right. And then you could, after about two and a half, three years, have gone back to wearing normal clothes.

Gosh, it was quite a long period, wasn't it? But for many, many Victorian widows, they chose to wear black for the rest of their life to show that permanent change in their status. So did Queen Victoria start that trend or was she just part of what was happening at the time? She was part of it. And because she was so influential. She was the most famous, I suppose, embodiment of that evolution of mourning. She helps to perpetuate it as well. So it's a bit of a chicken andand-egg situation so she's not the originator but she probably helps keep it going with that profile. But this

shows us that although she didn't come out of that mourning period she did she did move on like you say to the second stage and you know have these kind of shiny bits on there. And then stayed there because that was her status now as a widow and in the very last year of her life she's writing in her journal how he died 40 years before but she was still Miss Prince Albert and so this was personal to her as well as conventional. But did she talk about her clothes in in the diaries that you've seen? Very little actually, that could be because all of her diaries were actually rewritten by her daughter, Princess Beatrice, and there

might have been a censorship of things that seem frivolous, like clothes or servants mentioned, so we can't be entirely sure. But when she does talk about her clothing in her diary later in life, it's about the embellishments on the bodices. Oh, right. And that's actually the only thing that really differentiates them, because when you look at them, the structure of each one is the same. And in terms of how that impacted fashion at the time and what other widows were doing. Do you think the fact that Queen Victoria chose to prolong her mourning period had an influence on other women of sort of you know aristocracy at the time? Were they were they minded to continue their

mourning period for longer because the Queen was? Again I think she is following convention as well as set in it. It's not, historians have looked at this can't find a clear-cut causality but it's actually Was to a certain extent there's a bit of a problem Especially in the 1860s that first decade where she completely retreats from public life, which is not Which many widows that would have been okay But if you're Queen you need to be seen in her government got quite answered I didn't and they were they were very keen to try and persuade her out into the public more.

And she does eventually. From the 1870s, she does make more public appearances. But those first few years, I think after that initial three years of deepest mourning as prescribed by society, when she's still doing it, it does create problems. But as we've said, it becomes her iconic image. It becomes the identity. And is this the first time you think that this has been displayed? Ever?

Ever. Oh, right. Ever. And who owned it beforehand, when you bought it at the auction? It was passed down from a family of a page in the royal household who had cared for it since. So you can prove where it came from, that it's legitimate and genuine. Completely, the provenance, and that's another reason

I was so excited and so keen to acquire these for the Royal So-Memorial Dress Collection, because the provenance was absolutely rock solid. And also, you get a sense, if you've worked with Queen Victoria's clothing a lot, of her. So I've actually measured a lot of her clothing, the measurements were absolutely perfect. Oh wow.

You do get a sense, because clothing is so personal, and you really see that here. So behind the bodice of the 1870s, we jump forward 30 years with a bodice, with a whole dress dated to 1897. You get a sense of her size as well. The size has changed, hasn't it, Matthew? The size has, as women's body shape change has evolved from the bodice to the dress, I'd say the waistline has expanded.

Well, I mean, not many people keep the figure of the 50s into their late 70s. Fair enough. And that's what I like about it. It's really human as well. That's why I really like it. And talk to us about that. When would she have worn that dress?

So as I said, Victoria, when she does talk about her clothing later in life, it's about the embellishments on the front. I think that's how they were differentiated for different occasions. So the large dress of the 1890s there has these frills of black lace down the front. It's got these net sleeves, so quite open sleeves, and it's got quite a low neckline. So that suggests to me, especially the lower neckline might have been more suitable for evening wear. And those light net sleeves suggest perhaps it was worn

either in the evening or in the hotter months as well and that's the only way you can really begin to think when she might have worn things. Tell us about the hat as well because it looks almost like something a barrister would wear here in court. Again that was another like look that became quite iconic of her wasn't it with the sort of white netted cap. Those are very rare. Are they?

They're so fragile. Yeah, it looks it. What is it made of? It's made of very fine silk net, and I always get a bit scared when I'm handling them. I prefer the conservators to handle them, to be honest with you, because they're so delicate. And that's kind of gloves. That's your gloves. That's your don't breathe.

Keep handling to a minimum. Yeah, the Conservatives used needles that usually reserved for eye surgery to work on something. Wow, really? That's fine, yes. But what you've got is these always gathers of pale net and they come, it's a cap that sits on top of the head, comes down into a peak, so what we call a widow's peak. And that's a style that was, I think think inspired by Mary Queen of Scots actually very old style for widows Becomes iconic for Victoria, then you have the lapettes Peak comes from yeah

Matthew where would that have been made without been British made or made in France or it hard to say, but we do know Victoria was really keen to support the British lace industry. So it could be a British lace because especially for something like her wedding dress in 1840, she particularly wears honiton lace and which helps to revive the honit haunting lace industry. So she's quite aware of where her clothing is coming from and that by supporting British manufacturers, that is an important thing she can do as queen. And the story of the dress, I suppose, if you're saying it's evening wear, this was her coming back out a little bit

into public events and you can see the lovely train at the back that wasn't there just for her own amusement, presumably that was for a bit of show. This is a more, yeah, this is a more um I'd say this is more of an evening dress and you do get that differentiation some of the more day dresses have details like little buttons on the skirt so she could slightly lift the front of the skirt so she could walk more easily probably very important because she was very infirm in her old age as well. She suffered quite a few health difficulties and so you can think that clothes that were easier to walk in were suitable and also these dresses are very easy to put on

these bodices. Really? Well really easy. So clothing from earlier in her life, it's more perhaps the ever fashion of the early 19th century, they're quite difficult for our conservatives to put on. These late Victoria dresses, just you get the mannequin, you pad it out so it's exactly the right size and shape for the dress and then you put the skirt on, it ties up with a tie at the back. You've got bodice.

Well, there have been a corset worn underneath. Could have been a corset, there could have been a corset. She probably did wear a light corset, but the bodices themselves are boned and have a structure. Right, so not necessary. So a lot of shaping is taken care of by the outfit. like corset but the bodices themselves are boned and have a structure right so a lot of shaping is taken care of by the outfit so this is kind of dressing down slightly Victorian style it's a bit more comfortable perhaps dressing down I mean she's still a queen and that's what I'm always struck by with her clothes. But easier to put on than some of the

older pieces I'd say easy to put on, but looks incredible. Yeah. And that's exactly what you want for you, if you're a queen. Well, it certainly looks incredible in this exhibition. And how nice to have it here in Kensington Palace where she was born as well. It's wonderful to bring pieces like this home, really. It's come full circle. Well done for winning those bids, Matthew. Yeah.

Thank you. Cheers, Matthew. Thanks, Sue. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. So just around the corner from Queen Victoria's bodice is something very different. So what we're looking at now are two dresses, young girls' dresses, in the Liberty, the famous Liberty floral print design. And they're a little bit faded. And these were worn by the young Queen Elizabeth, was then Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and Matthew you think because they're a

little bit faded and worn they've been wonderfully conserved that they might have been handed down from Elizabeth down to Margaret and and reworn. Well that's my theory. Okay well we'll work with it. Talk us through that. So yeah. Talk us through a little bit of the history of these dresses. These dresses, they were worn, as you say, by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at that time where, when they were growing up,

they were always dressed in matching clothes. A lot of siblings were at the time, but it was really distinctive for them. It was very much their own dress code, I think. And what kind of ages do you think they were when they were wearing these? Well, they date to 1936 so that would have made Princess Elizabeth about 10 right and Princess Margaret about six

Very small very small indeed. Yes, but you can see actually the bigger one Princess Elizabeth one looks a bit bigger than a 10 year old does and When you start looking at the dress you can work out why that is because the hem has been taken up and the fabric used to add an extra panel in at the waistband. So it lasted how longer? You can see the slight difference between the dresses. It's like playing spot the difference basically and then underneath. It's a bit more worn as well isn't it? And the side of the bodice there's a bit of fabric there so the whole bodice has been made bigger as she's grown and as you say if you look at it I mean it's beautiful floral print in reds and greens and blues so Liberty so classic, it's much more faded on the big dress. So it's obviously been worn a lot more. And when I've shown this to people who have grown up with siblings, especially the younger sibling, they've got, oh yeah, probably hand me down.

So that's my theory. Even in the royal family. Even in the royal family. But certainly that thrifty attitude, I think, of the 1930s, you can see that with the dress. The way, instead of buying new, they've made what they have last. and you do get stories of little Princess Elizabeth with her nannies saving wrapping paper for reuse as well so quite an economical

thrifty upbringing. The original sustainability. And that's the point. Which Elizabeth's son King Charles is notorious for because we're always being told how, when he goes to big formal occasions, whether it's the weddings of his sons, he's wearing suits that he first wore in the 1970s. And he's patched up his old jackets. Patches up his shoes constantly with different bits of leather and sense of fermenting all the time.

Can you tell us, Matthew, what kind of conservation work has been done to these two dresses? Where would they have been stored over the years, and how have they been conserved to be in such pristine condition, albeit a bit faded? The reason they survived this book is they were given to Elizabeth and Margaret's nanny,

Clara Knight. Oh, right. Who had been a nanny in the Queen Mother's household as well, and then, so she looks after several generations of the family. And so the dresses were given to her, I think as a moment. It's an interesting gift, isn't it? Yeah, the dresses were given to her, I think as a memento. It's an interesting gift, isn't it? Yeah, the dresses were given as a memento of the little children she looked after.

And then passed down through her family. And obviously kept in great condition. Kept in really good condition. And then we were able to acquire them a few years ago. We've, at Historic Royal Palaces, have never shown them to the public before. They've been seen elsewhere, but this is the first time they've been shown at Kensington Palace and it was actually a bit of an interesting conservation challenge. They're in generally very good condition but because they have been worn a lot

you did have a few old repairs on them and especially in this beautiful very delicate fabric overlay at the, you can see at the collar. The Peter Pan collar. Yeah, the Peter Pan collar and at the cuffs. And especially on the larger dress, that had started to come away and there's some quite big stitches there. So obviously, as they were being worn, a quick repair was done. And so I had a really interesting conversation with our conservator.

And she said, well, obviously I can do that repair better. a quick repair was done. And so I had a really interesting conversation with our conservator. And she said, well, obviously I can do that repair better. I can make it invisible. And we actually agreed together that that would have been to take away part of the history of the dress. So you kept those in? We've kept those in.

So we kept those in. The story, yeah, the full story. To keep that full story. So she just put a very, very fine layer of almost invisible fabric over that, just so it's all nicely held in place now. It won't fray anymore, but we've kept that history because that story of the reuse and the repair down the hole, these parts of it. And there's delicate buttons over there, down the front there.

I know, aren't they sweet? The little mother of pearl buttons it's a real classic children's look. Yeah you can see you know Princess Charlotte wearing something like that now can't you and Princess of Wales has talked about you know she does hand me downs with her two boys and I mean it's so as you say it's so much talk about sustainability in fashion now but actually we just need to look to what people in the past did because they did it naturally, this is what they knew. Lessons from the past. Absolutely lessons from the past. We don't have to make anything new, we just have to relearn what our grandparents knew and did naturally

and you can see that with these little dresses. They're very sweet, aren't they? They're so cute. I think they're one of my favourite things in the exhibition. They're just lovely. And quite a momentous year. They date from 1936 and we know that because it's when it became certain that little Princess Elizabeth would be Queen one day, because that's the year of Edward VIII's abdication. And how far they resented the throne. Exactly and that's the moment it was certain that she would be Queen. So there's a momentous history behind the dresses of that year as well.

They're wonderful pieces. Thank you for telling us about them. So we're saving the best for last because, Matthew, you've told us that this one is one of your favourites. So can you describe the two outfits in front of us, which were both worn by the late Princess Diana? We've got Diana, Princess of Wales, doing day wear and also more private evening wear here. So the day wear we should have worn for her official duties as a working member of the royal family is a red wool suit designed by Jasper Conrad in 1984.

It is the brightest red color and that's one of the oldest rules of royal dressing. You look at photos of the day and you can instantly spot her because she's wearing this block colour. It's a really richly textured wool and it's quite 80s in its design as well. You've got quite wide shoulders with nice pleated design,

very strong pleated detail on the skirt and I love the brass buttons in particular. Yeah, but they've got the anchor design on them, haven't they? They do and that is because the event was to launch a cruise liner named in the princess's honour, the Royal Princess. So you've got the bold red look for, you know, here I am member of the royal family going to stand out from a long way away on board the ship but then also those kind of small details as well woven into it. Exactly, most crowds would never have seen those little anchors on the buttons but if you come to the exhibition at Kensington Palace you can see them here. And how did this come into your collection? We acquired this at

auction a few years ago so it's really wonderful to get the range of pieces that she would have worn for different duties, different times of day, different events in her life. And that's why, actually one of my real big personal favourites, and the nice thing about being the curator of an exhibition is you can put your favourite pieces in, is this green velvet dress by Catherine Walker dating to 1992. So this is exhibited alongside the red suit, but it's the same old wow factor, isn't it? It's what Catherine Walker would have called

a dignified showstopper. Right. It was her words for the dresses she designed for Diana Princess of Wales, especially for evening wear. A slightly kind of masculine top there. It looks like almost the top of a suit or... Well, Catherine Walker's really interested in tailoring. And why I love this dress is because it combines

two evening dress codes. So it's a long, very figure-hugging green velvet with these beautiful diamante buttons, but with a double-breasted effect because they're paired going up the dress. And then you have the tuxedo-style collar. So that's another code of evening wear, but the tuxedo style collar. So that's another code of Evening wear but the tuxedo collar becomes a halter neck It is a fabulous piece of design and we know from Diana's designers that

She had several wardrobes and the wonderful evening dresses we associate with say film premieres But only half of the story often for more private formal Events she wore even more bold and creative designs and so behind this but away from the camera She was actually wearing more kind of fashion forward stuff Yeah, and I think she liked playing with different designs different ideas, which you can see with this one But then of course she does wear this for that famous Vanity Fair photoshoot with Mario Testino and she sends it out into the world as part of an auction of 79 of her dresses at Christie's in 1997. And that's raised money for her charities? It raised over

3.2 million dollars for HIV AIDS and cancer charities. And they've been doing the circuit ever since some of these outfits which is hence why it's come into your collection. It's why we were able to acquire it at Historic Royal Palaces. Well, it's fantastic. Matthew, thank you so much for showing us around. It's been absolutely fascinating to learn how much time and dedication goes into preserving and conserving these wonderful outfits and how much they tell us about a unique bit of history.

So thank you. Yeah, it's so nice to see them up close. it really takes you back in time, doesn't it? Seeing this green velvet halterneck dress from Diana takes us straight back to the 1990s and to that Vanity Fair cover where, as you mentioned, the Mario Testino shoot, she's seen smiling and the text next to it said, she's found herself the way she wants to live and that certainly is reflected in this clothing. Kate, is it alright for you to think about what your style is? How you rock an outfit every day to work?

Maybe, maybe there's definitely something about what we wear and what it tells the world that maybe we should all consider a little bit more. Well I think I'll spend a little bit longer looking around this beautiful collection of dresses and what it means in terms of fashion inspiration. Until next time, thank you so much to Kensington Palace, to Historic Royal Palaces for inviting us today, and to the exhibition curator, Matthew Storrie. Thank you very much.

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