I hadn’t been able to interview anyone who had worked on the gown, nor even anyone who had worked for Norman Hartnell in the 1940s or 1950s, and so with that door closed (or so I imagined), I resolved to learn for myself how the gown’s embroidery had been created. I met her in February 2017, towards the end of a research trip to England. As part of my research for my forthcoming novel The Gown, I searched for them for months, running into one dead end after another, before chance led me to one remarkable woman who had worked on the gown. No one thought to interview the embroiderers at the time, and little trace of them survives in the thousands of stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. But who had created those enchanting details? The women who stitched the embroidery labored anonymously.
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