Watching All The Coverage of Queen Elizabeth

It really was awful. And she had lost weight just before the wedding so she was swimming in that dress.

It was hideous, but set off a tsunami of like hideous wedding dresses. That dress launched at lot of ugly into the world.

I read she hated it, but the family insisted she wear it. I think it was considered really fashionable in the 80s.

No one realized that much taffeta crammed into a carriage would wind up resembling origami.

It was a fabulous dress.

Timeless, romantic, luxurious in a very old fashioned way.

I think the wrinkled silk was incredibly chic - old money.

I was very much aware of these things then. The gown was considered a flop even then. The train especially was loathed.

I don't recall that at all, but recollections may vary.

[quote]It really was awful.

OP it may look awful today, but 40 years ago it was EVERYTHING. IMO it was the catalyst that ushered in the era of big puffy everything in the 1980s.

It was trend setting. Charles Jamesian ball gowns came back in style.

I think with Diana’s figure, the puff of the dress engulfed her. She would have done better with a more slender, form fitting dress.

r10 it was the 80s, it was all about the PUFF darling, the big, the dramatic!

Diana's wedding dress looks like something a Mennonite bride would have worn a hundred years ago. These days it would classify as "modesty attire".

I read yesterday that part of the thinking was the designers were going with the whole fairytale princess idea, which did envelop the proceedings but that, and there's some sense to this, they felt the day needed a big dress given the scale of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Thought it was ugly then. Haven't changed my mind.

Diana’s hair is what has aged most poorly, not so much the dress, in my view. It also wasn’t fitted properly to Diana because she had lost so much weight (Meghan’s dress was also too big on the day).

OP, it was a HUGE game changer. Wedding dresses in style before this wedding were MUCH different. After Diana spencer got married, EVERY little bitch wanted a fucking fairy tale wedding just like this, with a HUGE dress to match

Yes, her hair was very flat in front and that was odd. She wore tiaras many times afterwards and managed her hairstyle better.

Before the wedding dress was the black strapless opera gown (by the same designers) that created a sensation and started the trend. ‘Shy Di’ no longer.

I loved her gown. But I was eight years old and got up at 5am to watch the wedding.

Forget it, Jake. It’s the ‘80s.

[quote]Why didn’t someone stop her?

A question asked for one reason or another pretty much every week of Diana's reign, and beyond, right up to the car trip that didn't need to be that fast or done without a seatbelt.

As to the wedding, though, as one who watched it live:

- the commentators made the point, reinforced by Diana in later times, that it was a humid day and the humidity flattened hair that had been set with more volume.

- it very much WAS Diana who wanted that dress. She wanted to be a fairytale princess and she wanted the longest train in the history of Royal weddings, just as she had wanted the biggest engagement ring in the shop. Complete BS that the family demanded she wear it - you are confusing her with Jackie Kennedy.

- R16 is right, the dress was a huge game-changer. Prior to that, for nearly two decades there had not been a famous wedding dress with the waist ON the waist and a flared skirt, so it appeared extremely feminine and lavish.

- the dress was made of a fabric called paper taffeta. It always creases like that, but it pulls straight readily. The designers expected some creasing but were unaware how small the coach would be in comparison to the size of the skirt, and obviously nobody had been there at the start of the trip to "pack" her in properly, so it looked terrible when she got out of the coach. Once she got up the stairs and into the ?nave, though, the Emmanuels and the bridesmaids tugged at it and it looked perfectly fine as she walked down the aisle.

- Diana was 19 and had very dowdy tastes. That wedding dress was a kid's idea of what a princess bride should look like. I'm sure she learned to scorn it later on when she became proper fashionable, but she would never have said so because the public was fond of it (see, game-changer). Similarly, she was still to meet the stylist who would tell her to for God's sake thin her fringe and push her hair back off her face. At the wedding stage she was still "hiding" behind a helmet of hair that extended right down to her eyes.