Biker shorts, ball gowns, boxy suits. 

As always, the costume department of The Crown had their work cut out for them creating the classic ’90s looks that would wind up on screen in the show’s fifth season. Between the principal characters, guest stars and background actors, there were thousands of costumes to complete for the royal drama’s return.

Set in the tumultuous ’90s, The Crown Season 5 follows the royals as they begin to lose favor in the public eye.

“I do think each season has a different tone, different flavor,” costume designer Amy Roberts tells Tudum on the series’ London set. After reading creator Peter Morgan’s scripts, the research begins as the team sifts through photos and films or references the politics and history of the era. But after all that background work, she emphasizes, “You’ve got to throw it away.”

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

Aside from key moments when the costume team had to be “forensically accurate,” says Roberts — for example, Princess Diana’s “revenge dress” at the Serpentine Gallery, the queen’s annus horribilis speech at Guildhall — they let that research guide their creative process rather than being locked in to creating a stitch-for-stitch recreation of an outfit. “There are many bits in between where you don’t know what they said, you don’t know what they wear, so you can then put your creativity into that,” she says. 

Associate costume designer and head buyer Sidonie Roberts likens the process to making a juice: “We put it all in, and then what comes out is just the essence of something and that’s what you work from — the essence and the muscle memory. ‘‘Did [Diana] wear it?’ becomes less the important question, but rather, ‘Do I believe that our Diana would wear that?’

Below, Amy and Sidonie Roberts take Tudum through how they created some of the season’s most iconic looks. 

Queen Elizabeth II 

While Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth was dressed in “sugar colors and pinks and apricots” in Seasons 3 and 4, Imelda Staunton walks into a much darker, almost “autumnal” version of the character, says Amy Roberts. “The queen is getting older. Her mother’s getting older. Her sister is sadder, even more depressed about her life. Her marriage has had its ups and downs, and now she’s dealing with growing apart. Her husband [is] finding emotional comfort with another woman — which is somehow more threatening than if, as she says, ‘it had been a girl in a short skirt in the typing pool’ kind of thing. It makes her more lonely.” 

Another of the designer’s favorite looks for the queen is her plaid: “I always like her when she’s in her kilt, and in Balmoral and the cardigans — when you see what she probably jolly well would’ve liked to have been her life: out with the dogs and horses.”

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

Princess Diana

Elizabeth Debicki steps into Emma Corrin’s shoes as Princess Diana. The Australian actress plays the royal through her official separation and divorce from Prince Charles (Dominic West). 

Inside Princess Diana's Wardrobe in The Crown Season 5Elizabeth Debicki chats with the show's costume designers.

“There are key moments that you recognize,” Amy Roberts says — namely, the revenge dress — “but there’s a huge amount of her private, quiet moments in her apartment in Kensington Palace… There’s always some lightness, obviously, but there’s a slightly more somber tone. And we’re edging into what [Diana] will be next season, so we will move slowly out of patterns. There’re more block colors. There’s bottle green. There’s a kind of turkey red. We’ll be quite plain next season, I think.”

“The [Diana look] that I think everybody’s absolutely excited about is just the Virgin Atlantic slouchy jumper with the cycling shorts, in the trainers — the Reeboks. And we’ve got the Harvard one — Harvard made the original ’90s [sweatshirt] for us,” says Sidonie Roberts. “There’s been this massive resurgence of Diana’s later looks. She was in the royal family from such a young age. When the divorce and everything happened, I think there was a real [feeling of], ‘OK, who am I outside of this?’ There’s a real strength to how she decides to dress. And I think contemporary women also want to inhabit that strength and feel empowerment through how [they] dress.” 

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

“This suit is quite an important one because Diana was not originally meant to be in Episode 6,” says Sidonie Roberts, adding that the episode was going to serve as a “marker” to “shift her” fashion from one style to another. “So [Episodes] 1 to 5 would be the earlier stuff and then 7 to 10 would be the later stuff. I’ve bumped her into the later period [in Episode 6] with the much simpler ’90s silhouette. So the wider shoulders, the long line jacket and the much shorter skirt, but I’ve done it in a fabric that’s more in keeping with what came before.”

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

Princess Margaret

“I think this was the last season where real pattern could feature quite heavily,” says Sidonie Roberts, who spent the 2020 lockdown designing custom textiles for Margaret’s (Lesley Manville) costumes. “There’s a scene where she sits in the bath, so we made her a matching turban in the same fabric. She gets out and she’s putting her makeup on and she’s got this kimono on [and a] fantastic turban in this same fabric.”

Keith Bernstein/Netflix 

Prince Charles

Prince Charles was always a stylish dresser, says Amy Roberts, but this season’s menswear stands out thanks to the baggier, ’90s-style cut of his suits. “A lot of the guys rather warmed to it. I found when you did the ’70s, ’80s, which was slimmer, tighter, there’s a lot of guys who will blame this tightness of the suit on the suit, not the fact they’ve drunk too many pints. Now, with that bigger, boxier shape, they can do what they like. So I think they rather like it. And there’s big, wide shoulders. I think they feel like [it has] that kind of old movie star look because it is like that, isn’t it? Those ’30s big, wide shoulders.”

Martin Bashir

Then there are the small details, like the glasses that Panorama journalist Martin Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah on the show) was known to wear. “If those glasses that Martin Bashir wore look shit on [Puwanarajah], why am I going to do it? We’ll do a ’90s shape and the thin frame, but they’ve got to work on you, the actor,” says Amy Roberts.

Military Uniforms

And what would a season of The Crown be without a ceremonial occasion or two that call for elaborate military dress? Indeed, Season 5 showcases quite a few different styles of military dress — so many that it required its own department. Uniform Supervisor, Max Birkett headed up the operation, which Amy Roberts describes as a “specialist job. I really give that over. It’s a whole different ball game, I think, and the military is about doing it absolutely right and correctly. I honestly can take no credit for any uniforms you see. They’re brilliant. They’re perfect and it’s all down to Max and his assistants. But we had to make a lot because a lot of it wasn’t in existence.”

The Crown Season 5 is available to stream now.