How Amy Roberts Costumed Season Five of ‘The Crown’ Like a Thriller

The fairytale is over. Season five of Netflix’s The Crown reaches for darker emotions than its previous seasons, and we find ourselves in more melancholy territory than ever before. Emmy Award winning costume designer Amy Roberts returns for the penultimate season, and she leans into the pensiveness with restrained beauty.

We are catching up with the present as The Crown hurtles towards its final season, and this season covers from 1991 to 1997. We feel something in the air about to change, and we all know what that is. Roberts doesn’t just recreate outfits that have been photographed to death, but rather relies on the character arcs to inform her designs. Since her separation from Prince Charles, she has been spending a lot of time alone by herself in her flat. Elizabeth Debicki’s character is in a totally different place from when Emma Corrin introduced us to The People’s Princess back in season four.

“To be honest, my impulse is always the storytelling over the clothes,” Roberts says. “It’s the only way that I know how to do it, and the clothes come from that inspiration. It’s so much more than The Royal Family this year, I think. This season is quite dark, and it’s quite cloak and dagger. Diana is now trapped in that flat in Kensington Palace, and, it seems, that she only gets out when she’s almost in disguise. I think the challenge for us was figuring out what to put her in. Everyone knows the power shoulders and things like that, but Peter Morgan was really telling a more private story. Our biggest challenge was work out what Diana would wear when she’s hanging out at that flat. It’s quite like a thriller as the season mounts. It was always about disguises with sunglasses, baseball caps, and those fabulous, ’90s coats that you throw on with cowboy boots. We thought it was very much that strand. I think there are only two or three public moments like when she goes to the hospital with the red suit and black collar. I remember [there was a worry] because the hospital walls were red. I felt like it was about blood that was going to be inevitably spilt.

In Debicki’s first scene, she is trying to reignite what is left between her and her husband. Diana and Charles are on a yacht together with their children before Charles bails unexpectedly. It’s almost as if we are witnessing her wardrobe shift in real time.

“When we first see her this season, it’s a bit of the old Diana,” she says. “She is in the print dresses, and she’s touring around with Charles when he is in the safari suit. Diana is also in a safari suit, because she is desperate to link with him. It’s a last-ditch effort to have the kind of life that they used to have. And, like a lot of stories in The Crown, it all goes tits up. Then Diana is living this isolated life and separated from Charles. It’s almost like any wealthy, bored woman, but you know the power she has.”

One of the best scenes of the season comes when the couple dissects what went wrong. They speak quite frankly with autopsy-like precision. Just seeing their clothes provides a contrast. Charles (embodied by Dominic West) remains conservative in his gorgeously tailored suits while Diana sports a sleeveless turtleneck that confirms how she has come into her own womanhood. She isn’t the young girl he sought to court when they were younger.

“It’s so fabulous to have bare arms,” Roberts says. “That scene is so breathtaking, because it tells the whole story of their marriage. I always suited Charles, because he is coming from the lawyer’s office. He’s very buttoned-up and unable to let go or unbend. I think that points to his creativity with the ties and the pocket squares. It’s a mixture of personal good taste, a good eyes, and British tailoring. You are setting up old school against this modern young woman who is desperate to break free. We end with her making that fateful decision to go on holiday to the south of France with the Al-Fayeds. We know where that leads. It interesting that you have the buttoned-up Englishman while she is losing herself into this entirely new world.”

It always comes back to the crown. Imelda Staunton’s Elizabeth connects with audiences because, I think, she reminds us of a grandparent or an elder in our lives. Elizabeth has always had to stand alone because of her position, but there is something sadder beginning with this cast change. The world is leaving Elizabeth behind, and seeing that on Staunton’s face is tragic.

“The story will even tell you where to go with the color palette,” she says. “That’s always been a big pointer since season three. There’s an autumnal tone to her costuming. The country isn’t responding to her. The kids’ marriages are all messy. There is little hope unlike previous years. Elizabeth is tired, and we see that when she is delivering the Annus horribilis speech. She expresses, for the first time, that her life is quite rotten. Her marriage with Philip is exposed again. She is at that dinner with this gorgeous dress with all of the jewels, and then she has to walk into this crisis with her husband. He wants other things. I loved that there is all that finery but she is feeling so different inside. It was written that she leaves the dining room and goes into her apartments. It just didn’t work. It looked odd that Imelda was wearing all of these things but she was saying all of these emotional things. I thought it would either work or it didn’t, so we decided to scarp it to something more stripped down. That was very interesting costume-wise–to say that she couldn’t say those things with that crown on. Sometimes, with clothes, you can change it on the day, and we did that day.”

The Crown is streaming now on Netflix.