A Wedding Dress To Remember

Princess Diana's Wedding Dress Designers Chronicle Experience In Book

(CBS) 
It may have been the evening that began the making of an international icon. It was certainly a moment that changed the Emanuels' lives. Elizabeth took the phone call.

Diana asked the Emanuels to make her wedding dress. "The fact that she asked if we would like to do her dress," Elizabeth pauses, "as if we might say no."

The Emmanuel's studio was a few floors up, on a side street in central London, where they code-named their client Deborah and employed two guards to help keep the design secret.

Outside their former shop, David recalls the scene: "Literally here the pavement was surrounded by photographers, paparazzi guys everywhere, right, and up on the roofs here, all of these they used to be pointing their camera lenses into our windows here."

In all the paperwork they saved, the Emanuels now say, there was never a formal letter from Buckingham Palace: no official commission.

Inspiration came from a conversation with Diana.

And if the palace wasn't interested in what the princess would be wearing, the rest of the world clearly was.

They designed a train 25-feet long with the scale of St. Paul's cathedral in mind.

Creating that drama, though, Elizabeth Emanuel recalls a Diana who seemed left on her own.

"Nobody really came to fittings with her. In the beginning her mom came, and then she would come alone. And I thought, you know, in a way that's quite sad really 'cause most brides come in they bring their mums, their sisters or best friends. She was quite lonely," Elizabeth says.

History records the sad divide between a perfect wedding and that royal marriage. Yet for the Emanuels, their regal fashion accomplishment forever remains a good memory.

Elizabeth says: "I can't think of anything bad. In the three months leading up to the royal wedding and the day of, was the happiest time, the most stressful time, the most incredible time of my life."