Diana, Kate + Meghan: So their wedding dresses remained secret

Until the last second, there was speculation as to which wedding dress Duchess Catherine would wear on her big day. But it wasn’t until she got out of the car in front of Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011 that she revealed the big secret. She follows in the footsteps of Princess Diana, whose dream robe was also kept secret until she finally made her grand entrance.

The secret of royal wedding dresses

But how did they actually manage to keep their clothes so secret until the big moment? After all, there are designers and seamstresses who work on the design and curious journalists and photographers who are just waiting to get a scrap of fabric in front of their lens.

Princess Diana’s veil breaks royal records

Let’s start with Princess Diana (†) in 1981. The Queen of Hearts commissioned the designer couple David and Elizabeth Emanuel about three months before her wedding to Prince Charles.

The designer duo set themselves the task of creating the longest royal train of all time. However, this requires several meters of fabric that cannot be easily hidden. That’s why the bobbin lace is made directly in Buckingham Palace – in the protection of the palace walls.

The silk that is needed for the dress, on the other hand, is ordered. But a trick is also used here: David and Elizabeth order the fabric from textile manufacturer Walters & Sons in two colors, one in white and one in ivory. So the final tone remains a mystery to the last.

Princess Diana had a second wedding dress as a backup

The third safety precaution is even more unbelievable: the designers then also completely worked out Diana’s second choice. If even the slightest bit of information about the actual dress had leaked out, the bride could have just slipped into her “spare” dress.

Kate’s dress is sewn in the “maximum security wing”.

Although Duchess Catherine did not have a replacement dress in 2011, designer Sarah Burton made sure that her studio became the safest room in Great Britain. She even has new codes set up for the doors. Only a certain number of seamstresses have access.

Among them is Mandy Ewing, who reveals afterwards: “We knew who the dress was for. But we kept it all a secret. We worked with the net curtains drawn. Also, the cleaning staff had to stay outside.”

So Meghan’s wedding dress remained a secret

It was different with Meghan Markle before her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018: Not even the sewing team was said to have been inaugurated. “It was a secret that only Meghan and I shared,” said designer Clare Waight Keller a few hours after the fairytale wedding. She would not even have told her husband and children about it.

Since the British fashion designer has been working for haute couture house Givenchy in Paris since 2017, she and Meghan had to find a different place for the design process. After all, it would have been far too obvious if Meghan had flown to France several times before the wedding.

The choice fell on her home in Chelsea, which the former actress visited incognito. With a baseball cap and an undercover look, she is said to have traveled secretly to Clare since January.

All the effort was worth it for the three royal brides: they all experienced their unforgettable moment and got everyone talking about their dress.

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