After months of speculation about who the bride would wear, the official royal wedding website reveals it’s, as our insider told us, Sarah Burton, the 36-year-old creative director of British fashion house Alexander McQueen.
Buckingham Palace revealed that Kate worked closely with Burton on the dress. “Miss Middleton chose British brand Alexander McQueen for the beauty of its craftsmanship and its respect for traditional workmanship and the technical construction of clothing,” the official site states. “She wished for her dress to combine tradition and modernity with the artistic vision that characterizes McQueen’s work.”
Leading up to the wedding, Burton squelched the speculation, telling Vogue UK, “I am not doing it,” and McQueen CEO Jonathan Akeroyd, who was said to have leaked the news to a colleague, which then ended up in the Times, denied the reports, remarking, “No, not at all. I am the CEO. I would know if we were doing it.”
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.
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