Catherine Middleton and Sarah Burton have successfully kept the best-guarded secret in fashion history. The incredibly moving moment when the new Duchess of Cambridge stepped out of her car in an Alexander McQueen dress was the fantasy everyone in fashion has been dreaming would come true.

The dress—pure and yet conveying the grandeur of its importance—is an exquisitely modern example of a personal collaboration between a bride and her designer.

Catherine has followed her own taste: a V-neck décolleté and a silhouette that stayed close to her torso, and long, delicate lace sleeves that evoked, perhaps, the wedding dress worn by Grace Kelly when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956.

On her head, she wore the Cartier Halo tiara (lent by the Queen, who herself was given it by her mother on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday) which carried the nuanced balance of simplicity, regalia, and family meaning. 

Technically faultless in its scale and construction, the dress allowed the bride to move with ease, carrying all the weight of British history and expectation without the slightest wrinkle or hitch.

That such a feat of appropriateness should have been accomplished in intensely secret conditions—and continually denied by the designer—is in itself incredible in a world of Internet gossip, iPhone photos, and instant communication. More important, it was the symbolism of a partnership in which the individual wishes of a young woman have been expressed and enabled by another young woman of vast talent whose understanding of fashion’s role in serving, and underlining, this historic moment is nonpareil.

1 year ago  |  3463 notes

#Vogue#Fashion#Royal Wedding#Wedding Dress#McQueen#Sarah Burton