41 Facts About Norman Hartnell

Sir Norman Bishop Hartnell was a leading British fashion designer, best known for his work for the ladies of the royal family.

Norman Hartnell then worked unsuccessfully for two London designers, including Lucile, whom he sued for damages when several of his drawings appeared unattributed in her weekly fashion column in the London Daily Sketch.

In 1923, Norman Hartnell opened his own business at 10 Bruton Street, Mayfair, with the financial help of his father and first business colleague, his sister Phyllis.

The Doctor Who actor William Norman Hartnell was his second cousin.

Thanks to his Cambridge connections, Norman Hartnell acquired a clientele of debutantes and their mothers, who desired fashionable and original designs for a busy social life centred on the London Season.

Norman Hartnell was considered by some to be a good London alternative to Parisian or older London dress houses, and the London press seized on the novelty of his youth and gender.

Norman Hartnell's success ensured international press coverage and a flourishing trade with those no longer content with 'safe' London clothes derived from Parisian designs.

Norman Hartnell became popular with the younger stars of stage and screen, and went on to dress such leading ladies as Gladys Cooper, Elsie Randolph, Gertrude Lawrence, Jessie Matthews, Merle Oberon, Evelyn Laye and Anna Neagle; even top French stars Alice Delysia and Mistinguett were said to be impressed by Norman Hartnell's designs.

Norman Hartnell utilised British woollen fabrics to subtle and ingenious effect; though previously sidelined by London dressmaking, the use of wool fabrics in ladies' day clothing had already successfully demonstrated in Paris by Coco Chanel, who showed a keen interest in his 1927 and 1929 collections.

Norman Hartnell successfully emulated his British predecessor and hero Charles Frederick Worth by taking his designs to the heart of world fashion.

Norman Hartnell specialised in expensive and often lavish embroidery as an integral part of his most expensive clothes, which he utilised to prevent exact ready-to-wear copies being made of his clothing.

The originality and intricacy of Norman Hartnell embroideries were frequently described in the press, especially in reports of the original wedding dresses he designed for socially prominent young women during the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1935, Norman Hartnell received the first of what was to be numerous commissions from the British royal family, in designing the wedding dress and bridesmaid's dresses for the marriage of Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott to Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester.

Until 1939, Norman Hartnell received most of the Queen's orders, and after 1946, with the exception of some country clothes, she remained a Norman Hartnell client, even after his death.

Norman Hartnell took his advice and employed the talented Parisian 'Mamselle' Davide, reputedly the highest paid member of any London couture house, and other talented cutters, fitters and tailors to execute his designs to the highest international couture standards by the 1930s.

In 1929, Norman Hartnell showed his clothes to the international press in Paris, and the floor-length hems of his evening dresses, after a decade of rising hems, were hailed as the advent of a new fashion, copied throughout the world as evidenced by the press of the time.

Norman Hartnell's clothes were so popular with the press that he opened a House in Paris in order to participate in Parisian Collection showings.

Norman Hartnell had already had substantial American sales to various shops and copyists, a lucrative source of income to all designers.

Whilst it was a triumph for Norman Hartnell to have gained Queen Mary as a client, the four young wives of her four sons created fashion news.

Norman Hartnell designed her 1934 wedding dress and the bridesmaids dresses for her marriage to Queen Mary's fourth son Prince George, Duke of Kent and when Molyneux opened his London salon, designed by Lacoste, she became a steady client of his until he closed the business in 1950.

Norman Hartnell would go on to receive a Royal Warrant in 1940 as Dressmaker to the Queen.

Norman Hartnell joined the Home Guard and sustained his career by sponsoring collections for sale to overseas buyers, competing with the Occupied French and German designers, but a growing group of American designers.

Norman Hartnell received her endorsement to design clothes for the government's Utility campaign, mass-produced by Berketex, with whom he entered a business relationship that continued into the 1950s.

Norman Hartnell was among the founders of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, known as IncSoc, established in 1942 to promote British fashion design at home and abroad.

Norman Hartnell was commissioned to design women's uniforms for the British army and medical corps during the war.

Norman Hartnell would go on to design service uniforms for nurses and female officers in City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police.

In 1946 Norman Hartnell took a successful collection to South America, where his clients included Eva Peron and Magda Lupescu.

Norman Hartnell created the going-away outfit and her trousseau, becoming her main designer to be augmented by Hardy Amies in the early 1950s and appealing to whole new generation of clients.

Norman Hartnell designed dresses for many other clients who attended the ceremony, and his summer 1953 collection of some 150 designs was named "The Silver and Gold Collection", subsequently used as the title for his autobiography, illustrated largely by his assistant Ian Thomas.

Norman Hartnell designs were augmented by a number of gowns from Hardy Amies, her secondary designer from 1951 onwards.

In 1968, Norman Hartnell was involved with the redesign of female police uniforms for the Metropolitan Police.

Norman Hartnell designed and created collections on a smaller scale until 1979 with designs for the Queen and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother still commanding his time and attention.

At the time of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, Norman Hartnell was appointed KCVO and on arriving at Buckingham Palace was delighted to find that the Queen had deputed Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother to invest him with the honour.

Norman Hartnell designed and created collections on a smaller scale until 1979.

Norman Hartnell was buried on 15 June 1979 next to his mother and sister in the graveyard of Clayton church, West Sussex.

On 11 May 2005, the Norman Hartnell premises were commemorated with a blue plaque at 26 Bruton Street where he spent his working life from 1934 to 1979.

Norman Hartnell never married, but enjoyed a discreet and quiet life at a time when homosexual relations between men were illegal.

Norman Hartnell considered himself a confirmed bachelor, and his close friends were almost never in the public eye, nor did he ever do anything to compromise his position and business as a leading designer to both ladies of the British royal family and his aristocratic or 'society' clients upon whom his success was founded.

Norman Hartnell's dresses were worn by another Streatham resident of the past, ex-Tiller Girl Renee Probert-Price.

Norman Hartnell first designed for the stage as a schoolboy before the First World War and went on to design for at least twenty-four varied stage productions, after his initial London success with a Footlights Revue, which brought him his first glowing press reviews.

Norman Hartnell is featured as a character in the first two seasons of the Netflix drama The Crown, portrayed by Richard Clifford.