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When Lady Diana Spencer stepped out of her horse-drawn coach on her wedding day, July 29, 1981, there were gasps heard round the world -- and not just the good kind.
Talk about ruffles and flourishes. The dress she wore to marry Prince Charles -- by a then-little-known husband-and-wife team of British designers, David and Elizabeth Emanuel -- was a billowing confection of ribbons and bows and lace, puffy sleeves and frilly collar, hundreds of yards of petticoat netting and wrinkled silk taffeta, thousands of sequins, a 25-foot train and a tiara-topped veil almost as long.
"It was a magic moment when she came out of the coach like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, and the dress expands and gets bigger and the train goes on and on and on," says Elizabeth Emanuel, today a London designer with a couture label, Art of Being.
Now, with the dress turning 25, the Emanuels have written a book, A Dress for Diana (CollinsDesign, $29.95), to tell their story of its creation in the three frantic, secret months leading up to the wedding. They say people, especially Americans, still ask about the dress.
"The dress is iconic because Diana wore it," says Elizabeth Emanuel. But it was definitely a dress of its era, she says.
"It was an '80s-style dress, and it was ivory, which no one was doing at the time, and wedding dresses and fashion were two separate things. Once we did that dress, suddenly wedding dresses became part of fashion and set off the trend of big skirts and ruffles."
It's certainly remembered as the archetype fairy-tale princess gown, perhaps the most famous wedding dress of all time. That, and a widely loathed exemplar of excess in what would become a decade of excess.
"Looking at it now, I tend to think, 'Wow, those sleeves are bigger than her head,' but at the time I was totally swept up in the drama and the magic and the fantasy," says Heather Cocks, co-founder of gofugyourself.com, which features saucy analysis of celebrity fashion sense (or lack of it).
But Diana's dress seems to have been influential beyond her wedding day, if you count what appear to be imitators. Think Mariah Carey (designed by Vera Wang), Celine Dion (Mirella and Steve Gentile) and Melania Trump (John Galliano for Dior) -- to say nothing of the less-celebrated brides who chose the over-the-top route in their own walks down the aisle.
True, Carolyn Bessette set off a trend with her elegantly simple slip dress by Narciso Rodriguez at her wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr. in September 1996. But in 2005, the third Mrs. Trump chose a hugely ornate, strapless gown, in which she posed for a magazine cover weeks before the ceremony.
"Which made the wedding less about the love and the bond, and more about the clothes and the cost and the aura of false royalty," Cocks says. "For someone who is looking to awe people with what has been spent on the bells and whistles, it's certainly believable that they might look back to (Diana's royal wedding) and think 'How can I capture that?' Because we were all captivated by that."
Contributing: Mary Cadden
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