Is it odd to say that it felt almost relaxed, natural? That the unique fusion of emotion and ceremonial managed to utilize the pomp and splendor of the biggest British royal event in 30 years as a mere foil for the simple happiness of a confident young couple at ease each other? Yet, if you compare the scenes today at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton with the stiffer, more distant ones surrounding those of William’s parents in 1981, that is the biggest marker of the generational shift piloted by a couple, who in tough times, when the idea of royal privilege might be seen as an affront, have, from the start, only provoked a mass outpouring of goodwill, good humor, and British jollity.
The key to all is that this is such a believable marriage, a relationship that has developed in private for ten years—unlike the more seemingly unequal bonding of a 20-year-old virgin and an older heir to the throne which began the ill-fated union of Charles and Diana. The style of their son’s wedding asserted, instead, a frank and modern sense of honesty, as well as a tactful awareness of his and his bride’s place in the wider world.
Photo: John Stillwell/AFP/Getty Images
All of this was conveyed in the imaginative and sensitive ways both Catherine and William put their own fresh interpretations on traditions that could have seemed—and this was always a risk critics played up—heavy, anachronistic, and a vast waste of public money.
In today’s wedding, although none of the spectacular British pageantry of soldiers on horseback and glass coaches was reined in (with the exception of those rather comic royal minibuses), it was the straightforward, personal touches which were the most telling of the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, setting the tone of the day, perhaps even for their entire future.
Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff - WPA Pool/Getty Images
The symbolism of tradition meeting a sense of modernity was there in the fact that the bride did indeed “design her own dress,” in a style that she is sure suits her, but in collaboration with one of the best designers in the land, who orchestrated the highest skills of the McQueen atelier and the Royal School of Needlework, who did the lace appliqué. It was there in the fact that she chose to carry an unpretentious posy, rather than a showy bouquet, which contained the lovely old English garden bloom Sweet William. And it was there in the fact that the couple brought nature and life into the solemnity of Westminster Abbey in the form of those 20-foot trees: not just an extravagant gesture of a wedding florist, but an imaginative incorporation of the Prince of Wales’s passion for gardening and ecology, brought indoors for the day, only to be taken out and replanted for the future.
It’s perhaps all those breathtaking and even moving elements of today’s flawless event that will overshadow the wedding’s impact as a collective fashion moment, although there were indeed plenty of signs of the times to be read in the Abbey.
The tenor of 2011 as a well-dressed royal guest—if one is female—is to keep to something tailored, in a single color, and to the knee. Restrained elegance, with a simple, slightly waisted silhouette was the unspoken dress code adopted by the most
eye-catching guests.Although none of the invitees flaunted specific runway looks, their subtly covered-up chic is of course, right in line with the general message fashion has been putting forward over the past season or two, come to fruition in a “real” way which will no doubt alter the look of all weddings and special occasions from here on into the next decade—and all for the better.
Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
What didn’t work—and it’s amazing how small errors of taste can assume quite glaring proportions, even in a church as vast as Westminster Abbey, under lights and and before a multitude of cameras—was any inkling of extraneous flesh, be it bosom, arm, or leg. Anyone who chose an overly busy pattern might be regretting it tomorrow, too.
The aisle was also
the most public runway outing millinery has ever enjoyed—and the British know how to do this better than anyone. What worked triumphantly with all those tailored dresses was something equally tailored and elegantly simple—the angled disc, the side-worn sweep of semi-sheer straw, all worn on sleekly controlled hair. (As of today, the fascination with the feathery fascinator is distinctly a thing of the past.)
In total? This was a day when the sense of the proper and the very grown-up outclassed everything, but with a sense of dignity and grace rather than rank snobbery. Those are exactly the words that would also apply to Prince William, in his red-jacketed uniform of the Irish Guards,
Prince Harry in his gold-braid-bedecked uniform of the Household Cavalry, and their father and grandfather similarly attired. For some reason, apart from the incredible dress
Sarah Burton made for Catherine, it was the sight of the men in British Army, Navy and Air Force ceremonial garb that will be burned in the mind’s eye of two billion people as the greatest memory of William and Catherine’s historic tying of the knot.
