If you binge-watched the first season of Netflix's series The Crown then you know that, along with the abundance of royal drama, the show's other biggest pull is the exquisite costumes. To celebrate the launch of season one on DVD this month, BAZAAR sat down with the woman behind the season's breathtaking outfits, BAFTA and Emmy Award winning costume designer Michele Clapton If you recognise her name, there's a reason. Aside from designing the costumes for The Crown, Clapton is also the creative direction responsible for Game Of Thrones' wardrobe , a project she will be returning to next season. Here we chat with Clapton about royal wardrobe choices and things you didn't know about the show's most iconic outfits. RELATED VIDEO: WATCH 'THE CROWN' SEASON 2 TRAILER

1. The most time-consuming costume was Queen Elizabeth’s wedding dress

"It’s funny because the most elaborate, time-consuming was the Queen’s wedding dress. For me, it wasn’t as exciting because we were replicating her real dress, but the pressure was on to get it as close as we possibly could to the original. And we didn’t know if they were going to film it in colour or black and white. We had to do it as though you were going to see the whole thing in colour. So when we saw that it was just in black and white footage, we like 'oh my god, we just made that whole scene' and you’re only seeing a tiny element and we didn’t know that. We have to imagine that we would see everything, that’s quite tough."

"But sometimes it’s not actually how big or difficult the costume is, it’s about coming up with the ideas for the simplest costumes that can take almost as much time, whereas there’s a process in the big costumes. For example, so many people helped make the train for the wedding dress and I love the people who work for me that made it look so beautiful. For me, one of the most important costumes was deciding what Elizabeth wears when she’s in Kenya and she hears of her father’s death. For this scene she’s just in her husband’s shirt and that’s actually important, if not more so than the wedding dress, so I think it’s getting that balance between big frocks and just poignant moments."

2. Princess Margaret’s wardrobe was inspired by Paris

"There were particular designers who were quite closely associated with the Queen, but with Margaret I know she wore Dior and so there was always a bit of a flare and her wardrobe was a bit more daring. I knew she was inspired by Paris so I looked at the shapes from there and throughout the process we saw some really beautiful pieces. I think I copied one outfit and then tried to do an interpretation of the others. Each character had their designers that they used to wear so I’d look to them for inspiration, like Hardy Ames for the Queen and Schiaparelli for Wallace Simpson."

3. The most difficult pieces to design were the outfits the royals wore in private

"We decided that it was really important to get the big things right, like the coronation and the wedding, and anything that had to match what public already knew about, or settings, like being in Balmoral. But there wasn’t much information on the side of the story we were trying to tell, which is the really private side. So that’s what interested me most, and of course there’s artistic license but I tried to base it on the things that I read about the characters. Once the big pieces were in place, that brought us the right base to explore what were these people really like, what made them tick and what’s important to them, and how a young woman found her way through this incredible position she was placed in, somewhere she hadn’t expected to be for a number of years. I think it was looking at people as people and not as the Queen or the Princess and asking ‘who are these people?’."

4. Queen Elizabeth’s outfits were deliberately 'simple'

"I always thought the Queen, even in season and listening to her, would have been just a country wife if she hadn’t been elevated to royalty. She seems to have a liking for sweet things and something pretty and her colours were quite simplistic. I also sense that clothes were really unimportant to her, so I tried to show that in the fact that the colours chosen for her are not sophisticated. Although the dresses are beautiful and I think she enjoyed wearing them they weren’t really important to her, unlike Margaret. They’re both pretty, they both enjoy stuff but Margaret had so much time to think about these things and she had to create a world for herself and a style and a place. I think that was the difference."

5. Wallis Simpson was Clapton’s favourite character to dress

"I loved dressing Wallis Simpson although she wasn’t key to the story and I always thought her style was really interesting. For Wallace’s costumes I looked to designers like Schiaparelli because I liked the width but I tried not to copy any costumes directly but again I tried to take the essence of something, like the width of a Schiaparelli or so on."