Designing the dress
de Vos of label Peter Pilotto.
Just like Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, who managed to keep the designer behind her wedding dress a secret until she arrived on the steps of St. George’s Chapel in May, Eugenie kept onlookers guessing until the very last minute. The princess had chosen Peter Pilotto, a London-based fashion house with two creative directors, Pilotto and his partner, Christopher de Vos, to create a showstopping silk-jacquard gown.
The dress was elegant: white and sculptural with long sleeves, a portrait neckline that folded around her shoulders, and a sweeping back that showed off the bride’s scars from an operation to straighten her spine.
In a break with tradition, the bride did not wear a veil. She did wear the dazzling Greville Emerald Kokoshnik tiara, lent to her by her grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II. Created by the French jewellery house Boucheron in 1921, the tiara is made of brilliant- and rose-cut diamond pave set in platinum, with six emeralds on either side of the main stone. It was bequeathed by Dame Margaret Greville to Queen Elizabeth in 1942.
Pilotto and de Vos created the dress from a bespoke jacquard fabric featuring symbols meaningful to the bride as motifs. A thistle representing Scotland is a tribute to the royal couple’s Balmoral, the queen’s estate in Scotland, while the Irish shamrock a nod to Eugenie’s Ferguson family.
Pilotto and de Vos, who met while studying in Antwerp, Belgium, are known for their colourful aesthetic. But unlike Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen and Clare Waight Keller of Givenchy, the designers who created the wedding gowns of the Duchess of Cambridge and Duchess of Sussex, neither Pilotto nor de Vos are actually British. They are, rather, Austrian-Italian (Pilotto) and Belgian-Peruvian (de Vos).