Princess Diana’s wedding dress to gawp at? Too fussy?

It may have emerged from the golden carriage horribly creased (well, they could hardly have a steamer in there, could they? It would have fogged the windows) but up close, in the current Royal Style in the Making exhibition at Kensington Palace, the wedding dress of HRH Diana, Princess of Wales is actually a bit of alright.

Elizabeth Emmanuel, the designer, might be keen to emphasise that it’s a very 80s dress - which of course it is: you can almost imagine Steve Strange in it - but there is something definitely historical about it. The funny thing is, as perhaps the only woman in the western world entitled to wear a white wedding dress, it’s very much off-white. Ivory, even. You might even say cream. And the train is, frankly, ridiculous.

The dress - fully ironed - forms the centrepiece of a great little (and it is very little) exhibition that draws together designs, toiles, bits, bobs, nicks, nacks and, of course, outfits. And not just DPoW’s either. There’s the Queen Mother’s Coronation frock, something Georgian Princess Margaret once went to an orgy in (we’re extrapolating), a pair of the Queen’s teeny tiny shoes, all punctuated with video footage of the designers in question and people talking about them, including a chat about Princess Margaret’s designer, Oliver, whose boyfriend cashed the cheques the designer stashed in a box, Karen Walker-style.

Very much a size-zero little show, tiny, boutique even, which, of course, leaves more time for drinking supermarket fizz in the middle of Kensington Gardens afterwards. We did. We might again.

Royal Style in the Making, Kensington Palace, London’s Glittering London
hrp.org.uk