Hofdame Note: Thank you to our eagled-eyed Baguette Elizabeth Davies for picking up on this royal re-wear! We know you all love a wedding.
So we all got excited when Princess Beatrice wore a remodelled dress belonging to the Queen for her wedding; but how about this?
On 10 June 1948, Princess Anne of Bourbon Parma married King Michael of Romania There had been a lot of bother about the wedding, as she was Romas Catholic and he was Greek Orthodox and he had in fact been recently deposed by the Romanian government. So the wedding was hosted by the Groom’s maternal uncle King Paul of Greece at the Royal Palace in Athens.
The bride wore a beautiful Parisian satin brocade gown, with a seven metre train. She wore a tiara and Greek orders, in tribute to their hosts.
Now fast forward to 1983. The exiled Romanian monarchs had brought up a family of five daughters, and the second daughter, Elena (sometimes called Helen) was about to marry the British Robin Medforth-Mills in Durham, England.
Their wedding was much lower key than that of her parents. Elena decided to wear her mother’s beautiful wedding gown. Five meters of fabric were cut off the train and used to remodel the bodice to suit the 1980’s fashions.
Fast forward another sixteen years to 1996. The heiress, Princess Margareta, was getting married to Romanian commoner Radu Duda, in Lausanne, Switzerland. The ceremony was attended by a number of Greek royals and other ex-royalty in exile (the Serbs and Portuguese were there), but the bride was in her mid 40’s and she thought she could do no better than further remodel the “family wedding gown”.
She presumably used more of the surplus train and possibly reinstated the original sleeves, and proudly wore her mother’s gown for its third outing.
I suppose, strictly speaking, it was the skirt and fabric being recycled, rather than the whole dress, but still. What do you think of these three bridal looks?