How will Kate Middleton's wedding dress measure up to history?
Hilary Alexander was given a preview of a lovingly restored and rarely seen collection of royal wedding dresses dating back to 1816.
In what was once the late Princess Margaret's apartments at Kensington Palace, the six wedding dresses, each one a fashion fairytale brimming with true stories of passion, power and politics, are bathed in the glow of concealed spotlights which capture the sheen of satin, and the twinkle of silver, still glistening after nearly 200 years.
Abiding love, love thwarted, love lost, and love ultimately denied; the deepest of all emotions are embedded in silken folds, painstaking stitches of Honiton lace, and tiny flowers of orange blossom and rose, fashioned from wax, embellishing the off-the-shoulder, 'Bertha' necklines.
The royal bridal gowns, recently the subject of a major project by textile conservation experts from the Historic Royal Palaces charity, are very rarely on display,if ever, but are unveiled today, to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
Apart from their place in the history of the monarchy, and their fashion lineage, the dresses are a fascinating timeline of the public hunger for details of a royal bride's finery. The marriage of Princess Charlotte, the spirited, only child of the future King George IV, to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, on May 2nd, 1816, for example, was the first royal wedding for which commemorative souvenirs were available nationwide. When Queen Victoria and her "beautiful" Prince Albert, were wed, in 1840, at the Chapel Royal, people lined the roads between Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace, and even climbed trees for a better view. Fast forward one hundred and twenty years to 1960, when Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, at Westminster Abbey, in the first-ever televised royal wedding service, watched by 20 million viewers.
