It's been nearly 39 years -- so let's confess. Diana's wedding dress was badly designed.

Why? 

The whole thing was massively overblown. Apparently, knowing that millions of TV viewers (more than three-quarters of a billion, as it turned out) would have to tell her from the guests and from her groom, for that matter, the designer thought that her train should be 8 miles long and the gauze veil over her -- emphasising her chastity? -- should be fountain-like in its volume, and that her sleeves should be layered and large enough to accommodate the biceps of an Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Viewed from a certain perspective, the dress was a typically 1980s botch. Her bouquet was less a posy than an escutcheon, reaching down her dress in almost Little Shop Of Horrors fashion. (I swear that thing was still in a growth phase even as the wedding proceeded.) The dress itself seemed to emphasise her shoulders, while leaving her lovely neck bare of ornament -- and all at the expense of her chest, which no one was invited to notice. The rest of her was rendered as a triangular meringue. In short, the dress was fussy, frilly, unflattering, and out of proportion. Why did no one see this at the time?

Well, some did. As one Canadian journalist wrote just after the event, ‘only a monster would suggest that the dress was too much’. Well, I shall be that monster. When your fabric shoulders are broader than your groom's — even with his uniform on — you can be sure that your dress is far too much. No wonder she thought there were three people in her marriage: she began it by wearing enough for two of them.

And then imagine what it would be like to be trapped in that thing, but needing desperately to wee (or pee, for North Americans). How would you negotiate a normal toilet — or indeed ANY toilet, no matter how large the lavatory — with that much fabric getting in the way? You’d need three ladies-in-waiting on three stepladders to lift enough silk for sufficient clearance. Either that, or the world’s longest catheter, held by the ladies-in-waiting like a relay team to empty into the toilet! (No, I do not have prurient interests, but was only propelled into such thoughts by the enormous unmanageability of the dress.)

A note about the lace. It was hand-made and belonged to Queen Mary. The lace is most prominent as the rather unnecessary extension of the sleeves, though it is apparently layered on her collar as well. Perhaps it was there to distinguish the dress from a commoner’s, but it also fulfilled the whimsical requirement of ‘something old… something borrowed’. Queen Mary wore the lace in a way that is utterly foreign to modern fashion, which is why it could be used to a new purpose without apparently robbing any antique clothing. In Police At The Funeral, a 1931 detective mystery by the English writer Margery Allingham, we are told that the octogenarian matriarch had a closet full of lace, which she wore in rotation so that no one in several weeks would ever see the same lace on her twice. Presumably this lace was worn as a cap, perhaps with two trailing pieces from each ear, making the precise style and pattern more plainly visible. We are not accustomed to lace as a feature of fashion, but for centuries it was an essential component of both ladies’ and men’s dress.