Page 510 - The Secret Museum

relief as the curtain lifted, the ballet began and an audience exhausted from years of

war settled down in their seats to celebrate beauty and fantasy.

This tutu worn by Margot Fonteyn shimmers with beauty. It is the dress that
inspires the prince’s kiss. Margot Fonteyn danced in it during Act II, ‘The Vision
Scene’, when the Lilac Fairy – Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother – shows a
handsome prince a vision of the most beautiful girl in the world, Princess Aurora.
The princess has been sleeping for a hundred years and can only be awakened by true
love’s kiss. When the prince sees the princess dancing in this lovely dress, he is
smitten. He decides to find her, to kiss her and so break the spell. The prince and

princess get married, and they live happily ever after. The production was a massive
hit, and 150,000 people came to see it in that first season in 1946.

The Royal Ballet took the show to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in
1949 for its debut performance there, and it was such a success that Time magazine
put Margot Fonteyn on its front cover. The dress, and the production designed by
Oliver Messel, made Fonteyn an international star.

Margot Fonteyn danced ‘The Vision Scene’ hundreds of times in this tutu. It is
made from a pale blue Lurex with a bouncy silk net. The bodice is wonderfully
decorated with hand-drawn shapes and stitched on cord that twirls down the front of

the bodice and around the waist. It must have danced in the light as she moved.
When it was worn out, it was replaced in the 1960s with a copy, also now in

storage in Kent. It’s interesting to see the two dresses together. Both are made from
blue Lurex – probably the exact same material kept in stock by the wardrobe team –
and have crinoline straps, but, while the 1946 dress has a net skirt made from silk,
the sixties’ net is nylon. The earlier dress is more worn, as silk degrades over time. It
is also more delicate and fine and the decorations more subtle – a lot of it done by
hand, perhaps because there were fewer decorative materials around just after the

war, than in the sixties. The later dress is bluer and has lovely leaf shapes called
paillettes – sewn on to the skirt and 3D sequins on the bodice.

On both, you can see grey marks around the waist where the prince lifted Princess
Aurora up over and over as they danced. Part of the later tutu has been repaired
because of the wear from lifts.

Judith checked the crotch of the dress to see whether it had ever been displayed –
it hadn’t; the crotch was still intact. ‘It’s the strongest piece of sewing the wardrobe
does.’ The 1946 dress must have been on show at some point, as the crotch has been
undone to hang over a mannequin and then stitched back up again.

Neither of these two dresses will be worn again, but they are kept as memories.
The last production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House, in 2006, was

based on the first production in 1946, so the costumes were brought out of storage to
inspire the new generation of designers. Otherwise, they are sleeping beauties
themselves, lying in storage in Kent.