Exactly 40 years ago today, Princess Diana took her historic walk down the aisle to marry Prince Charles.
Now David Emanuel, the designer of Diana's stunning white gown, is spilling details of how he kept the beautiful dress under wraps before all eyes tuned in to the royal wedding in 1981.
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"The press would go through our bins looking for any scrap of fabric," Emanuel told Today. "So we were naughty — we put some pale pink in, pale lemon. Of course, the next day, the press (says), 'The Emanuels are doing a pale pink wedding dress.' It's kind of fun, but they took it terribly seriously."
Emanuel, a Welsh fashion designer who starred in reality TV wedding series “UK: Say Yes to the Dress,” said he and his then wife kept the dress locked in a safe while they weren’t in the studio.
The safe had to fit the dress’ record-setting 25-foot-long train and veil.
"They had to hire a crane," Emanuel said. "They had to take out the window, sail it into the building. So every night when we worked on the gown, we had this huge safe, and then we locked it up, because we kept on thinking that if anybody should break in — even though we had security guards — they couldn't break into the safe. It was quite a procedure."
The late Princess Diana and Prince Charles married on July 29, 1981. Emanuel described the media frenzy on the day of the royal wedding.
"They were on the rooftops, on my studio, looking with huge lenses," he said of the worldwide press coverage. "So I had to rush around quickly and get some roller blinds and put the roller blinds up and they stayed down until the wedding day. It was all kind of crazy but wonderful. Exciting."
The fashion designer went on to describe fond memories of the late princess.
"She was great and had a great sense of humor," Emanuel said. "All the way through, from day one, right at the beginning, she was kind, she was sweet, and she always wrote a handwritten note to say thank you so much," he added.
The dress is now displayed at Kensington Palace as part of a public exhibit called “Royal Style in the Making.”
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