The Epic Story of Princess Diana’s Wedding Dress: 3 Months, 25 Feet of Train and a Major Fashion Legacy

Thinking about the level of secrecy surrounding Kate Middleton‘s wedding dress 30 years later and Meghan Markle‘s gown seven years after that, that honor code didn’t budge a bit. It may have even become stricter, considering all the creative, new ways there are to violate privacy these days.

“I know we live in a culture obsessed with fame, but I happen to believe privacy is a virtue, and the relationship I have with my clients is private,” Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton, who made Kate’s dress, told T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2014. She didn’t open up about the experience until three years after Kate married Prince William.

“Some people,” Burton said, “like to think I’ve been too shy or that I’m afraid to speak up about the happy experience I had creating the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress, but I can tell you that is nonsense…There are people in the media who will always want to invent sinister reasons for people’s discretion, but an instinctive, intelligent, imaginative young woman’s wish for a beautiful wedding dress—or any kind of dress—is the most natural thing in the world. And I was honored to pick up the challenge and always will be.”

Givenchy designer Clare Waight Keller called Meghan’s gown “a very secret dress,” writing two years after the Duchess of Sussex’s 2018 nuptials, “Through hours of conversation, meetings together, and research, slowly all the pieces…came together. Purity and simplicity were the guiding principles, a narrative of nature through the 53 florals of the Commonwealth to bring the world into the journey of the ceremony and subtlety bringing the lines of Givenchy and the history of the Maison to capture the classical timeless beauty I knew she wanted to achieve.”