Priscilla Costume Designer Never Saw Priscilla Presley’s Original Wedding Dress in Person Before Recreating it with Chanel

Priscilla Presley’s wedding look may be one of her most iconic, even though he was tasked with creating it for Sofia Coppola Priscillacostume designer Stacey Battat tells PEOPLE she never actually got her hands on it.

“Maybe they were in some archive boxes at Graceland, I don’t know,” Battat says as she explains that she never saw any of Presley’s famous looks in person while designing the costumes for the film. “But yeah, I’ve never seen a real dress.”

Instead, she worked with several photos of the dress Priscilla wore to her wedding to Elvis on May 1, 1961. Battat sent the images to Chanel who created the dress for the film starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi as the King. (The original dress was actually bought off the shelf by Priscilla, per Vogue.)

Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi in ‘Priscilla’.

Philippe Le Sourd/ A24

To recreate the look, Battat looked at some of Chanel creative director Virginia Viard’s older collections, where they found the lace they wanted to use before the fashion house team put together four options to choose from.

While it might seem like not having the original dress on hand would be a disadvantage, Battat says it actually had advantages.

Priscilla Presley wipes away tears after watching ‘Priscilla’ at the Venice Film Festival

“It’s important to see it, but if you can’t see it, it’s almost better, too,” she says, explaining that while the looks are inspired by actual pieces of clothing, they also have to fit the actors wearing them.

“If it’s that purple blouse, for example,” she says, referring to the look Priscilla wore in a famous family photo alongside Elvis in a blue suit and a young Lisa Marie Presley. “I can’t remember the exact number, but let’s say it had 12 fold lines. For Cailee [Spaeny], we made ten, because it’s her body. That it feels proportional and right.”

She adds, “I feel like even if it looks really, really authentic, which I think ours looks really authentic, I think they’re always some kind of interpretation.”

Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny in ‘Priscilla’.

Sabrina Lantos/a24

Battat explains that the couple’s wedding in the film is a sort of “culmination” of their years-long romance.

“Once Cinderella goes to the castle,” she continues. “And then maybe that’s when things start to unravel. It’s only when you get what you want that you can look at it clearly.”

The couple would eventually divorce in 1972, though Priscilla told PEOPLE a year after the entertainer’s death in 1977, “It was like we’d never been divorced.”

The sweetest moments of Lisa Marie Presley with her parents, Elvis and Priscilla

“We’d say ‘Mom said this’ and ‘Dad said that’.” It helped Lisa feel stable,” she said of the couple’s only daughter, who died aged 54 in January 2023.

In front of something PriscillaAt the Nov. 3 premiere, Coppola opened up to PEOPLE about the significance of the costumes in the film.

“The costumes are very important in portraying her character and her transformation from a teenager to a grown woman,” she said. “And all the details, Stacey Battat, our costume designer, did an amazing job and really showed what she was going through emotionally. We wanted to compare how young and innocent she was in the beginning to going to Graceland and becoming his ideal and ultimately finding herself.”

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Source: HIS Education