I looked like a movie star in my Bruce Oldfield wedding dress
Like Queen Camilla, Charlotte Eagar wanted a chic, flattering, age-appropriate dress for her special day – and she found the perfect person to help her out
I don’t have much in common with Queen Camilla. She’s a lot richer and older, much better with horses and dogs, and has a job with global recognition. But we have both made one identical decision in life: that the right man to make the dress for our moment of biggest public exposure is Bruce Oldfield. In Camilla’s case, her frock for the Coronation; for me, it was my wedding, 13 years ago.
I’m not at all surprised Camilla, 75, chose Bruce, as his clients call him. Bruce is one of Britain’s most distinguished couturiers: his clothes are chic, grand and magnificently structured, so suitable for a more middle-aged figure. That’s why I chose Bruce, at the age of 43.
Weddings are a morass of self-consciousness and stress. God knows what it must feel like to be crowned. Estimates of the numbers due to watch the Coronation vary from “only” 300 million upwards: 4.1 billion watched Elizabeth II’s funeral. Only 200 people were invited to see me get married, but that still felt like far too many.
Choosing a wedding dress may be hard – particularly if you’re rather older than the UK brides’ average age of 31 – but at least it’s a process many women have been through. Most brides get taken around by their mothers. There’s a whole wedding dress industry: Brides magazine, the nuptial gamut from Pronovias and Phillipa Lepley to eBay to London’s plate-glass windowed Wedding Corner, where white taffeta mannequins stand-off across the Fulham Road, like headless armies in a video game.
Coronation dresses are far more niche. There are few women on this planet who know what it feels like to be crowned. There’s no Coronation magazine, or not one I’ve seen. Camilla clearly can’t ask her predecessors for advice, because the Coronation would not be happening if the last Queen were alive. Has Camilla been on the blower to the queens of Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands? Or even Fiji?
Poring over old photographs in the royal albums?
Sadly both my mother and mother-in-law, like Camilla’s predecessors, were also dead when I got married. And many of my surviving relatives seemed to think I should be married in a café au lait suit, as apparently befitted my advanced age. It was bewildering and depressing and
made me want to elope. I don’t suppose anyone is suggesting Camilla wear café au lait serge.
Luckily I was taken in hand by a romantic novelist friend. “Don’t be absurd,” she said. “You’re not a divorcée!” And, invoking Camilla Parker Bowles’s wedding to the then Prince Charles, she added: “Even Camilla got married in a proper dress. And anyway, you suit a structured dress.” Which was a nice way of saying I had a small torso and a big arse.
We toured Wedding Corner and then ventured further afield: Vera Wang, Alice Temperley, wisps of chiffon, 1930s Marlene Dietrich glamour and Vivienne Westwood’s architectural anarchy. But my bottom really didn’t work in chiffon or Dietrich and, although I love Vivienne Westwood, she didn’t feel right. And the talk about café au lait was beginning to bite.
It was the Royal family, in the end, who provided my solution. “Lace!” said my romantic friend. “The Queen wears full-length ivory lace to the State Opening of Parliament every year, and she’s MUCH older than you!”
A regal dress requires a royal couturier, so, like Camilla, we were drawn to Bruce’s showroom on Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge. Bruce, after all, had dressed the Princess of Wales, Camilla’s predecessor, for years. For me, it was my first (and, unless there’s some extraordinary change in my financial circumstances, last) experience of Bruce Oldfield making me a dress. Camilla, however, has been going to Bruce for years: he made her dress for the Bond premiere and for her first tour as Queen, to Berlin. Having been his client once, I understand why.
Bruce had a chat about what I was expecting. “Older brides are so much more realistic,” he said, rather relieved. “They don’t think they can lose 30kg in three months or look like Kate Moss.” Then he showed us the rack of billowing ivory: “See if you get any ideas.”
“That’s the one,” said my friend, pointing to a filigree cloud. Bruce started drawing: swoops of skirt, bodice, sleeve and veil. Bruce seems to know your body better than you do yourself: I’d known from the start that the one thing I didn’t want was a strapless dress with a bolero jacket. Thanks to Bruce pointing out how my figure worked, strapless and bolero was what I got. The cut lost me a good stone. “Flirtatious,” said Bruce, “but with authority. It’s not a night on the town, it’s an occasion! And underneath there’s some serious carpentry going on.”
Camilla’s dress will be, rightly, far grander than mine. I’m expecting gold and pearl embroidery on ivory silk. I had neither the budget nor need for pearls and gold but my dress still took four months to make; I had to return for three fittings. Bruce seemed reassuringly impressed by the way my brutal diet and pilates regime was shrinking my bottom – although not, as we’d both
Bruce seems to know your body better than you know it yourself
earlier predicted, to Kate Moss proportions.
When my dress finally arrived, it hung, as I wrote for Tatler at the time, “like a snowy Christmas stocking from the top of my four-poster... My husband said I looked like a swan; my friends kindly said I looked like Grace Kelly.” I burbled about how I hoped I would wear it again, lined, perhaps, with another colour silk, for parties. For the record, I have never managed to fit into it since: I did wear it, undone, to watch Prince William’s wedding on telly. It’s in storage now: I could unearth it for the Coronation. Camilla’s dress, I imagine, will end up on creepy display at the V&A.
However, in the unlikely event I need a couture dress again, I know exactly who I will ask to make it. Bruce, if one of my films is ever nominated for an Oscar, you can expect my call.