The story behind the Norman Hartnell coronation gown that was lost for 40 years

telegraph.co.uk:

We saw Princess Beatrice wear one of her grandmother’s pristine Norman Hartnell gowns from the 1960s for her wedding in 2020.

The same is true of Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 crystal-embellished gown, which was controversially worn by Kim Kardashian at this year’s Met Gala.But when Emma Telford, a leading textile conservationist, thinks about the original condition of her latest project, a Norman Hartnell gown made for one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting to wear for the Coronation in 1953, she says her eyes start to water. “It was in such bad condition.

I wondered if it was actually too far gone,” she says. “Every time you touch it, it slightly powders away.”The dress was originally worn by Lady Rosemary Muir (née Spencer-Churchill), aunt of the current Duke of Marlborough whose family seat is Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

She was just 23 at the time, but as the daughter of a duke and the eldest of the six women appointed by the young Queen to accompany her, she was the most senior among them. “We’d been so well-schooled for so long that we knew exactly what we had to do and when we had to do it,” Lady Rosemary told BBC Radio 4 in 2013. “The Queen was very relaxed and full of confidence.