Still, Durran and her team spent hours painstakingly creating Knightley’s ’30s-inspired silk dress, which had to have “movement at the hem” and a low back. Although Wright had specified that the slip should be green, the costume designer landed on the exact shade by layering three different fabrics over each other, before asking an expert dyer to recreate the color. “He managed to get the intensity and the brightness of the green into the silk,” Duran recalled. “As to why that was the right color? I don’t know.”
Rather than just making one dress, the costume team actually produced multiple versions of the slip due to its fragility—with Knightley auctioning off the one from her collection for charity back in 2009. It went under the hammer for $35,000, with an LA Times article at the time noting that “someday [the dress] could be right up there” with Audrey Hepburn’s LBD in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or Marilyn Monroe’s white halterneck dress in The Seven Year Itch.
The fact that Knightley’s Atonement dress has frequently been referenced since then (including by London-based designer Nensi Dojaka, who reimagined the dress for Alexa Chung at the Serpentine Summer Party last year) suggests it’s more than earned its place in the fashion history canon.
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