Vow to make a statement

WEDDING FASHION:Ivory is the last word when it comes to Irish weddings, but the big-day dress is now a more covered-up affair, writes DEIRDRE MCQUILLAN

SINCE IT OPENED on July 23rd, the exhibition of Kate Middleton’s £250,000 wedding dress, along with the 1,000-diamond Cartier tiara she wore, has attracted nearly 400,000 visitors to Buckingham Palace. It closed last Monday, so final figures could be even more, but by the end of September it had already earned £8 million in ticket sales.

The dress, as was immediately evident when the bride stepped into the limelight, recalled that of Grace Kelly, which was designed by MGM’s Helen Rose for her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956.

In 2009, Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump, was the first to reignite the Grace Kelly trend when she married Jared Kushner in New York in a dress designed by Vera Wang in three different types of lace, modelled on the actress’s dress. The fresh use of lace and the absence of the usual strapless styles created a sensation and started a vogue for the more covered-up look in bridal wear. Some called it sleeve lust.

“What Kate Middleton did was put lace and beading back on the market,” says boutique owner Marian Gale, who within a week of the wedding had lookalike versions for sale in her Donnybrook shop for €1,000. “Irish brides are sick of the strapless look,” she adds. “They want cap sleeves and straps.”

It’s an opinion shared by Louise Kennedy, who opened her luxury bridal boutique earlier this year. “There has been much more interest in lace since the royal wedding. The younger bride doesn’t want strapless gowns and there’s a little more interest in longer sleeves. They want simplicity and lack of fuss. Second time round brides are looking for cocktail styles that they can wear again.”

The Middleton and Trump dresses may have won universal public approval, but a new book published by the VA called The Wedding Dress highlights one that horrified one particular groom. This was commissioned from Bruce Oldfield, the British fashion designer well known for creating glamorous evening dresses for high-profile clients including the Princess of Wales. Lisa Butcher, then a successful 21-year-old model, chose from Oldfield a figure-hugging white crepe gown with long sleeves and a train, but revealingly cut, with a wide, deep neckline, low-scooped back and cutaway sides. It also had brassiere-style fastening. The shocked groom was the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, who later remarked: “It was wrong for the occasion. A woman should dress only for the man she is marrying. It was sexy for the world, but not for me.” The marriage lasted 15 weeks.

Of all the clothing women wear, nothing is more fraught or charged with emotion than bridal wear, nothing chosen with more care and attention. It is an expression of the bride’s identity and status, reflects contemporary culture and taste, and can often turn otherwise gentle creatures into crazed bridezillas.

Most, though not all, eventually choose white or cream, the colours of choice for the past 300 years. In the UK, royal weddings have often translated into popular styles. Here in Ireland, however, ivory rather than white is the shade of choice and what sells today. “Soft ivory suits the Irish skin tone and Irish light,” says Louise Kennedy, an opinion endorsed by Gale. “It is ivory,” says Marion Gale, “ivory, ivory and more ivory is what brides today want, and they are more budget conscious – dresses under €1,000 are what’s selling now.”

For those who can’t afford the luxury of a handmade gown or those lavish diamond accessories, there are many alternatives; I’ve even seen wonderful paper wedding dresses in the little shop of Mireille Etienne Brunel in Paris, at 37 Rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement. A fashion editor of French Vogue wore one for these for her nuptials (she cut it short for the reception).

Some choose to buy online, but a recent event in Dublin staged by The Wedding Journal, which monitors auction websites, cautioned brides-to-be on the dangers of such purchases.

The most inspiring modern wedding dress has to be the one that closed the recent Jil Sander show in Milan, by the Belgian designer Raf Simons. It was a shirtwaister style with a full-length skirt that instantly struck a chord for its freshness, simplicity and modernity, and has been described as ravishing. Now who will be the first to cotton on to that?

The Wedding Dress, by Edwina Ehrman is published by the VA (£30/€35)