Embroidery Sample for the Coronation Dress of Queen Elizabeth II

The coronation dress of Queen Elizabeth II

This is one of several recorded embroidery samples pertaining to the development of the dress Norman Hartnell created for Elizabeth II to be worn at her coronation in Westminster Abbey on June second 1953. In October 1952, Hartnell began conceiving the gown, a process which lasted eight months. He worked together with six embroiderers of the Royal School of Needlework and submitted eight different designs to the Queen. The final dress featured the embroidered national flowers of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Nations, strewn across the bodice and bell-shaped skirt in a variety of garland-like patterns. The coronation dress took nine weeks and approximately three-thousand working hours to complete.

The embroidery on the present lot closely resembles the motifs on the final design. These include the English Tudor rose, the Scottish thistle, the Welsh leek and the Irish shamrock for the United Kingdom, while the Commonwealth Nations are represented by the Canadian maple leaf, the Indian lotus flower, the Pakistani wheat, cotton and jute, the Australian wattle flower, the New Zealand silver fern and the South African protea.

Some of the samples created in preparation of the coronation dress were gifted by Hartnell to the embroiderers who worked on them. Highly similar examples are part of the collections of the Saffron Waldon Museum and the National Gallery of Australia. These samples are a touching memento of the joyful start of Queen Elizabeth’s II reign, which commenced when Great Britain was emerging from the hardships of post-war rationing and lasted for seventy years, providing an anchor-point through ever-changing times for generations of people across the globe.