Of all the many changes that come with the crowning of a new monarch, some are more immediately visible than others. Stamps and currency tend to undergo a relatively swift update; the stitching on ceremonial uniforms might take a little longer, and post boxes are slow to crop up bearing a new insignia. In the four years since Queen Elizabeth II died, a new era of monarchy has been woven into the fabric of British cultural life as a new portrait and a new royal cipher have, slowly but surely, replaced the old on coins and epaulettes. At the Royal School of Needlework, an expert team of needleworkers has been toiling away on the latest stage of this evolution. In a few weeks, the great velvet curtain that hangs on the stage at the Royal Ballet & Opera will be replaced with a fresh version, bearing the insignia ‘CRIII’ for Charles Rex.
‘So, we always start from the middle,’ says Helen Stevens, one of the skilled embroiderers at the school. Her thimble-covered finger is hovering just above the rich crimson mohair velour destined for the new main stage curtains. The commission, a collaboration between the school and Gerriets, a 90-year-old specialist stage equipment maker, will be unveiled on May 14. But when I meet the embroiderers at Hampton Court Palace in mid-March, there is a little way to go.
Helen is explaining how they stitch the large CR III onto the appliqué. She points to a corner panel – a swathe of red velvet adorned with the Tudor Crown, golden palm leaves, and a glittering royal cipher edged with crimson braiding. ‘That one is now at a point where it has to be turned over and the ends finished off on the back,’ she says. ‘Then it’s ready to go off to be made up into the curtain.’
The curtain is cleverly constructed in removable pieces to make repair easier for the team at the Royal Ballet & Opera, who will look after them with a kit thoughtfully gifted by the School. At the end of the month, the panels will be carefully bubble-wrapped and tissue-papered, laid flat, and driven over 500 miles to one of Gerriet's factories in Umkirch, Germany, accompanied by threads, notes and instructions for stitching it all together in a careful handover. ‘We’ve built a lovely relationship with them so there’s a lot of trust and we know they’ll do a good job,’ says Gemma Murray, who graduated from the school’s apprenticeship programme in 2004 and is now the studio manager.
That relationship goes back at least 27 years to the last time new stage curtains were commissioned, while the Royal Opera House was undergoing a £214m restoration. Before beginning the curtains, Gemma and the eight embroiderers tasked with this latest commission delved into the school’s archives to look at reference drawings, fabric samples, artworks, job notes, and lists of suppliers from that 1997/98 project. ‘You always get a bit goosebump-y when you're finding out [about] these drawings, and you think of who's gone before you,’ says Gemma. ‘It still makes me go, “Oh, how lucky to get to do that.”’
Almost three decades and over 10,000 performances later, what must be some of the hardest working soft furnishings in the world bear the marks of age and usage including damage from thousands of tutus brushing up against the stitching as dancers rushed on stage for their encore – admittedly a pretty romantic way to acquire wear and tear.
Beyond the cosmetic, these curtains will carry an additional sense of renewal. The current curtains still show the familiar EIIR – the cipher of the late Queen Elizabeth II. King Charles is now patron of the Royal Opera House and Royal Opera & Ballet and the new curtains are set to mark a new era while also embodying a sense of continuity and history to which the embroiderers feel deeply connected. ‘You do feel a sense of responsibility,’ says Gemma. ‘I always feel really proud of what we achieve here with the team because we are now [part of] that history.’
It is a small but tight-knit team of eight working on the appliqué in a light-filled studio housed in former grace-and-favour apartments at the Palace. Not only does the project provide the rare chance for people to see their work in public (which is not often the case with private commissions), but the publicity around the new curtains has shone a light on their artform. ‘For us, it is such a brilliant showcase of [...] what can be achieved by hand,’ says Gemma. ‘I think sometimes people underestimate how powerful and how beautiful our embroidery can be.’
Hundreds of hours of work involving more than one million digital stitches and over 100,000 hand stitches have gone into creating the painstaking detail of the appliqué. The team visited the Opera House multiple times to take measurements – the curtains are about 11 metres in height – but also to see how the materials, colours and threads would look under the stage lights. Do the pearls on the Tudor crown resemble pearls even from a distance? Should the golden palm leaves be padded to create relief?
The black of the Tudor crown’s ermine spots were specifically chosen to stand out whether you are in the front row or the upper circle. The rich crimson velvet on the crown has been ruched to evoke the genuine article. Threads have not only been carefully colour-matched to the previous curtains but chosen to make sure they catch the light in a way that adds to the magic of the theatre.
This is the sort of detail for which the Royal School of Needlework is revered. Founded in 1872 by Lady Victoria Welby, over the past century and a half it has created myriad works ‘from book covers to wedding dresses to altar frontals to banners,’ says Helen, who has worked on a range of projects including the current Princess of Wales’s wedding dress and several pieces for the 2023 coronation. These might be among the most prestigious commissions, but the studio treats all projects with the same care and diligence. While I am talking to Helen, another embroiderer is delicately handling a wedding veil, lifting it and letting it gently fall through her hands.
The school’s long history of teaching traditional techniques is relatively unchanged since the Victoria era. Hand stitching, goldwork, and silk shading (also known as painting with threads) are still their bread and butter, and it has informed the team’s work on the new curtains. But it is clear the school is equally concerned with the future of the art form. It’s why they teamed up with Pete Tarrant at Digitek to partially digitally embroider the appliqué. ‘We know that [technology and hand-stitching] can complement each other,’ says Gemma. ‘It's not a replacement for hand embroidery. It's [about] how we can enhance that partnership together.’
When the new curtains are unveiled in May, they will signify a balance between tradition and innovation. For Sir Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Ballet and Opera, ‘the new curtains are not only a celebration of tradition and artistry, but a necessary investment in the future of our stage.’ They represent hundreds of hours of work, and years of acquired skills and preserved materials, while also looking to the future of each art form: ballet, opera and hand embroidery.
