When the dress is bigger than the day

old blue-blooded former kindergarten teacher who had managed to ‘snare’ Prince Charles. The world was breathless in anticipation of seeing a ‘real fairytale’ in the making. Media outlets, in particular women’s magazines, were in near frenzy to get any and every piece of information about Diana. It is difficult, amid the seemingly infinite media reporting on Diana, Charles, the Royal Family and every player in that great soap opera known as the House of Windsor, to be dispassionate about it. There were certainly huge and lasting effects of the marriage and its subsequent breakdown.

We are so familiar with the story by now.

The wedding dress itself – an enormous ivory silk taffeta confection with puff-sleeves, carrickmacross lace panels on the bodice, multiple layers of skirts and a matching twenty five foot embroidered train[1] was created by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, a young couple just a few years out from their graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1977.[2] Despite being self-confessed newcomers to the fashion world they were tapped to produce the wedding dress. “We were scarcely out of college when we first met Diana … we felt great affinity with her because we were all young, naïve, and completely out of our depth.”[3]

The Emanuels had indeed beaten the world’s most famous designers for the job of designing the dress, and despite the inevitable criticism of the dress from fashion insiders (it was described variously as being ‘too creased’ when she got out of the carriage, it was too full, dowdy, too ‘meringue’ etc), in hindsight it seems the young designers read the wind correctly, producing in the recession of 1981 a dress that was so huge, so detailed and so over-the-top in fantasy, that it became the most copied wedding dress of all time.

“’The Emanuel Look’ subsequently came to be shorthand for a soft look, but it certainly ushered in the enormous romantic movement in fashion of the early 1980s. While the designers and fashion insiders may have been correct in their critical assessment of the dress, the symbolic assessment by the mass market triumphed as women all over the world said a dramatic “Yes” to the Princess’ dress.[4] Certainly many will remember exactly where they were and who they were with when Diana alighted from the carriage to take that long journey up the aisle of Westminster Abbey.

(Imagining Kate Middleton in the mix is impossible at this juncture. What a difference three decades makes … or not.)

Wedding dresses have always been the jewel in the crown of haute couture shows. The last garment to be sent down the runway, usually worn by the designer’s favourite model, the wedding dress is regarded as the ultimate dress. It is normally the most expensive dress any woman purchases in her lifetime. The traditional symbolic virginal colour, white, denoting purity of mind, body and spirit, is used in homage to the religiosity of the church venue. Diana Spencer was hand-picked, reportedly by the Queen Mother, because she was most certainly a virgin, and also – a lesser known fact – because she was in fact more of a blue-blood, with a greater royal pedigree than even her husband-to-be, Prince Charles.

Perhaps the time was right for such a dress: the 1970s women’s liberation movement had seen many changes, women were fighting for their equality in the home and at work, divorce was gaining in acceptance and multiple marriages started to become more common. Against all this ‘progress’ however, the global economy was floundering and threatening to undermine any real independence gained by women. The middle classes were in decline with an emerging trend towards two disparate upper and lower classes, a trend that has continued today and, as the London riots of August 2011 showed, a gap that has only widened.

“It seemed that all women wanted to have a horse-drawn carriage, a massive white Princess dress and of course a Prince waiting at the altar for them.”

It was a time of yuppies and preppies and of course, the tribe that Diana herself was a paid-up member of, The Sloane Rangers, so-called because of their tendency to gravitate towards the expensive, upper-class haunt Sloane Square and their totems: pearls, discreet gold jewellery, twinsets, plaid and equestrian accessories.

The Royal Wedding, epitomized by Diana’s wedding dress, heralded a return to English conservative values: what could be more conservative than a wedding, and a royal one at that?

Feminists were necessarily subdued, as women (despite their protestations to the contrary) flocked to the notion of a Prince coming to rescue them from the everyday drudgery that feminism was supposed to rescue them from. Mythologically, the Royal Wedding ticked every box as women reverted to archetype. It seemed that all women wanted to have a horse-drawn carriage, a massive white Princess dress and, of course, a Prince waiting at the altar for them.

The last great conservative backlash of the twentieth century was completed with the union of these two hapless individuals, who whether by accident or design, served as conduits for the desires and secret longings of a world desperate to believe in happy, fairytale endings.

With the couple’s divorce amid a string of sordid revelations and the death of Diana in a car crash in Paris not long thereafter in August 1997, the myth of happily-ever-after was exploded. Diana was buried wearing a black long-sleeved Catherine Walker dress that she had personally picked out from the designer’s collection several weeks before her death[5].

Married in white, buried in black, Princess Diana’s story is possibly the quintessential tragic narrative of all time. The immense public outpouring of grief demonstrated in the unprecedented bouquets of flowers that were piled up outside Buckingham Palace, the public fury at the silence on Diana’s death on the part of The Queen and The Royal family, changed royal and societal protocols forever, and – irrespective of whether you were pro-Monarchy or not – would come to be viewed as a rare mis-step in The Queen’s previously unblemished reign (as depicted in the extraordinary The Queen, starring Helen Mirren).

The decades pass while dress itself remains, ever more poignant as the years pass. It now has a life of its own and is ensconced in a travelling exhibit, which breaks records wherever in the world it is exhibited.

It is assuredly one of the iconic garments in the long and fascinating history of dress, and its significance and symbolism will be analysed for years to come.

To be continued – When The Dress is bigger than The Day: Part 2