Wedding Dress Disasters

LONDON, April 8, 2011— -- Everyone knows the risks associated with wearing white. A speck of dirt shows straight away on a white top, so just imagine the challenge of keeping a wedding dress pristine!

There are endless possible wedding dress disasters, not all of which can be anticipated. Imagine having a plan in place for coffee spills, or calling in the carpenters to fix a wedding dress glitch.

Well, these were the exact measures put in place for Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson when they married two royal brothers, Princes Charles and Andrew.

The Royal Diary talked to the two women who know exactly what the job of wedding dress designer entails: Elizabeth Emanuel, who designed Princess Diana's dress told ABC News. And Lindka Cierach, chosen to make Sarah Ferguson's dress for her wedding to Charles' younger brother, Prince Andrew.

"We kind of made it up as we went along. ... We cared about security so much that we organized for a big metal safe to be delivered to the studio," said Emanuel. "We had to hoist it up through the windows."

"Every night we would lock the dress up in there, and we had to have security guards, Jim and Bert, and they had to guard it."

There was, of course, a backup plan just in case the security measures went wrong.

"We had another dress, and we could have finished it in 24 hours if we had too," said Emanuel. "The main difference was it didn't have the big puffed sleeves. It had slim sleeves."

And the plan in case of coffee spills?

"We made an overskirt to skip over the dress so you wouldn't see anything, smelling salts, safety pins, we doubled-stitched over the zip to make sure it didn't break."

Five years later, and a different designer was faced with the challenges of a new wedding. Lindka Cierach vowed to learn from the difficulties faced by Emanuel.

"We were at Buckingham Palace," Cierach told the Royal Diary. "It was literally the night before. ... She [Sarah Ferguson] looked amazing. She started walking from one part of the floor to the other, and my heart was going ba boom ba boom ba boom because in actual fact the train veered off completely to one side!"

"So then we had to hurry, rush call to Westminster Abbey, and the poor carpenters were up all night hoovering so the carpet was all upright so the train would carry on down the aisle and not digress one way or the other."