Now, Burton has admitted that it is the bride who deserves much of the credit. The British designer says the dress “was a collaboration” between Kate and Alexander McQueen, the French-owned label of which she is the creative director.
“It was made for her and has a lot of her personality in it,” says Burton, who was the guest of honour at a party to launch a McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Burton says that Kate, or the Duchess of Cambridge, as she now is, “couldn’t have been more lovely” as they worked together on the ivory satin and lace gown.
Burton also designed the dress worn by Kate’s sister, Pippa Middleton, who was the maid of honour. The Middletons were “really nice and down to earth”, she says.
The privately educated designer was identified by The Daily Telegraph as she entered the Goring Hotel, where Kate was staying, disguised in a hooded coat.
“The most fun I had was trying to hide,” she says. “We laughed a lot about that.”
Meanwhile, David Starkey, the historian, is more concerned with the curious outfits worn by the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie at the royal wedding.
“Beatrice and Eugenie suggest by their look bad blood and bad breeding,” says Starkey, unkindly. “You looked at them and they looked like the sort of demi-monde of Paris just before the First World War.”
Speaking at the private view of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition, at the Mall Galleries, he adds: “It was everything about them: the demeanour, the vulgarity.
“Their whole behaviour was ‘look at me’. I wonder if it’s mummy’s influence. By contrast, the Middleton family was so elegant, so poised.”
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