Seeing a good film, or hearing a great choir, or a wonderful film, we are often touched by the beauty of the whole, without actually thinking about all the details that go into making that perfect whole. And nowhere are small details more important than in the production of a royal wedding dress. It is not just a matter of a sprinkle of pearls here, and a sprinkle of a few diamantes there and heres the wedding dress. A royal wedding is a concoction that usually has some larger meaning behind its attractive faade. Sometimes the individual bride will have a personal input as to how she wants to present herself to people at large. Self-styled Princess of Hearts, Princess Diana, chose a dress to fit her title. It was largely evocative of romance. Often, the features of a royal dress will be based on the historical roots of either one or both partners. Sometimes it might be the historical facts that are part of the persons destiny. A bride who is to rule a number of countries, might have those countries insignias woven into the fabric of her dress. In the case of the wedding dress created for the then Princess Elizabeth, the dress was designed as an expression of time and place of the era in which the Princess lived. Externally, the most impressive thing about the wedding dress of the then Princess Elizabeth, was the beauty of the design. Over the whole of the dress, embroidered with white crystals and pearls, are garlands of orange blossoms, and rose buds, with trails of jasmine and syringe. While the details are beautiful in themselves, the design is based on Botticellis painting Flora. The setting of the painting is a lush garden, profuse with flowers to establish it as a bountiful spring. The garden belongs to Venus, the goddess of love, and cupid hangs somewhere above it to show that he is actively promoting love in a setting so fit for it. In this garden there are also the three graces, the very personification of beauty, grace and charm. As Zephyr, the god of the wind, pursues the nymph Chloris as they had a very bad habit of doing in Greek and Roman myths - she turns into Flora, the god of Spring and flowers. In 1947, when this wedding dress was designed, there had been little of spring and flowers in the lives of most people, and the design was a deliberate evocation of a the promise of beauty and hope for the future. The very abundance of decoration on the dress, establishes the desire to leave the scarcity of yesterday, and enter vital prosperity full of grace and charm. |
