The 1968 Sleeping Beauty was the first and most original attempt by The Royal Ballet to break away from the Oliver Messel-designed 1946 production. Producer Peter Wright and his designers Henry Bardon and Lila de Nobili took as their starting point Gustave Dore's illustrations to the Perrault fairy stories (which include The Sleeping Beauty), and so the ballet acquired 19th century Gothic settings. Instead of classical tutus, they returned to the knee-length net skirts which can be seen in photographs of the original 1890 production in St Petersburg. Although the new production had many admirers, and despite the beauty of the individual costumes, most of the audience had difficulty in accepting a new concept; the dancers disliked the tutus and felt that the padded hips were restrictive; many critics felt the longer line obscured the brilliance of the choreography. Eventually remakes of the costumes for the leading soloists were ordered. The skirts were replaced by classical tutus and thus the proportion between the long-line bodices and the skirts was destroyed; though conceived for the completely different shaped skirts, the heraldic symbols seem to have been directly transferred onto the remade tutus. Not surprisingly, the production emerged as less homogeneous than before, and after a total of only 66 performances it was abandoned.

De Nobili's approach to the costumes for The Sleeping Beauty was blatantly theatrical. These are not historically accurate costumes but the Middle Ages seen through the eyes of 19th century medievalism. The bold decoration included plastic mouldings intended for do-it-yourself interior decoration; the heraldic emblems were crudely cut out shapes, machined to give the impression of tooled leather, yet from across the footlights they 'read' as period decoration. As usual with de Nobili, the cut of the costumes was impeccable, and the court dresses were all made on genuine 1880s corsets.