The Hidden Message in Princess Beatrice’s Wedding Dress: Don’t Postpone Joy

Nobody understands sartorial diplomacy better than the women of the British royal family. To wit: the leek brooch the Queen wore to the 2020 Trooping of the Colour, honoring the Welsh battalion performing the ceremony; the maple leaf brooch Kate Middleton wore on her 2011 and 2016 visits to Canada, adding a Canadian touch to her British-designed dresses; the British designers like Safiyaa and Victoria Beckham that Meghan Markle regularly wore to official events, highlighting her commitment to her new home. (OK, that last example is a bit more complicated, but the point stands.) These women know how to tip their perfectly placed fascinators to the location, the people with whom they are interacting, and the occasion at hand without beating one over the head with the message.

Nowhere is this skill put to better use than in royal wedding dresses, which tend to incorporate symbols that both signify the bride’s personal interests and recognize the royal family’s place in the world. Think of Kate Middleton’s bridal gown, embroidered using traditional Irish lacemaking techniques and incorporating floral motifs from across the British Isles: the English rose, the Irish shamrock, the Scottish thistle, and the Welsh daffodil. Meghan Markle’s unadorned wedding dress was elevated by her 16-foot long veil, which featured California poppies, a nod to her birthplace, wintersweet, which grows outside her then-home at Kensington Palace, and flowers representing each of the countries of the British Commonwealth. Princess Eugenie’s wedding gown featured bespoke fabric incorporating similarly meaningful motifs: the York rose for her father, the Duke of York, shamrocks honoring her mother, Sarah Ferguson’s, Irish heritage, ivy for Ivy Cottage, the couple’s home at Kensington Palace, and a thistle recognizing her love of Balmoral Castle in Scotland. These motifs mix the personal and the public, recognizing these women’s place in the United Kingdom and beyond, placing the bride’s moment of joy in the larger social context.

Moreover, these dresses echo the symbols incorporated into Queen Elizabeth’s magnificent coronation gown, which boasted Tudor roses, Welsh leeks, Scottish thistles, Irish shamrocks, Canadian maple leaves, New Zealand silver ferns, Australian wattle flowers, South African proteas, Indian and Ceylonese lotus flowers, and Pakistani wheat, cotton, and jute. The incorporation of symbols of what were then the eight countries of the Commonwealth is not merely decorative, it is a visual depiction of the Queen’s relationship to each of the Commonwealth countries, giving their citizens a subtle stake in the newly crowned monarch and her reign. It provides reassurance that the Queen is not merely an English rose, but rather a member of the broader British landscape.

This very intentional message of belonging stands in contrast to the equally thoughtful message sent by the Queen’s own 1947 wedding gown. It was made, like her coronation gown, by court designer Norman Hartnell, the subject of a recent retrospective at the British Fashion and Textile Museum. This frock’s flowers were inspired not by the British Isles or Empire but by Botticelli’s Primavera, which depicts the rites of spring. The painting features Venus, goddess of love, her son Cupid, and the three Graces, as well as Zephyrus, the West wind who portends spring, and two avatars of his wife: the nymph Chloris, whom he abducted and transformed into the goddess Flora. Venus’s placement in an orange grove calls to mind the orange blossoms traditionally worn by British brides — particularly after Queen Victoria wore an orange-blossom wreath instead of a tiara at her 1840 wedding to Prince Albert — and which ringed the lower hem of the wedding gown. At the same time, you might be forgiven for feeling that Primavera (spring) is an odd inspiration for a November wedding. In the context of the relative deprivation of post-war Britain, however, it feels very apt. Spring is a time of rebirth and revival, which were sorely needed after the war.

The gown’s fabric was also full of symbolism, made of silk woven in the Republic of China rather than Japan or Italy, against whom Britain had just fought a war. More importantly, the fabric was purchased using the ration coupons distributed by the British government to encourage austerity during the war, when material and labor were diverted to military production and continued into the post-war austerity period. Then Princess Elizabeth was granted extra ration coupons for the occasion, and though her gown was richly adorned, the idea that she stood in solidarity with contemporaneous brides was potent. The event itself was seen as a much-needed boost, a reason for hope, in a country undergoing a difficult period reconstruction — a 21-year-old princess starting her new life after spending the end of the war training as a mechanic — and her dress similarly reflected that hope.

Which brings us to the most recent royal wedding: that of Princess Beatrice to Edoardo Mapello Mozzi on July 17, 2020. The wedding had been scheduled for May 29, but plans were scuttled due to COVID-related lockdowns. When restrictions were relaxed in early July, Beatrice pulled together a scaled-down, intimate, socially-distanced wedding. Rather than wearing the dress she had originally planned, Beatrice borrowed one from her grandmother, this time a Hartnell-designed gown the Queen wore to the opening of Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and the opening of Parliament in 1966.

As it was not conceived as a wedding dress, it bore no symbolic flora, but rather geometric diamante adornment, yet its meaning is perhaps more potent than that borne by Kate, Meghan, and Eugenie’s dresses. It connotes Beatrice’s special relationship with her grandmother, to be sure. More importantly, it harkens back to the wartime rationing effort, particularly the “Make Do and Mend” campaign that encouraged Britons to fix and refashion their clothes to make them last longer. This dress is beautiful, to be sure, but its wearing recalls the “let’s get on with it” ethos of post-war Britain.

This message resonates strongly in the COVID era, in which we all face at least a bit of deprivation as we sit at home, disconnected from our friends and loved ones, with soaring unemployment and a slackening economy. Spending extravagantly on an elaborate wedding and a new bridal gown at this moment would have felt incredibly out of touch with the times.

And yet, I believe this particular wedding dress signifies more than just the British stiff upper lip. Jewish custom holds that one should not postpone happiness. Once scheduled, weddings are typically not moved, although they are often scaled back when circumstances change, for example, due to a death in the family or even a global pandemic. Joy is an important part of life even when we are most distressed — perhaps even more so when we are most distressed.

Like her grandmother’s nuptials, Beatrice’s wedding represents a small step forward, a harbinger of change, a hope for the future, a recognition that life goes on. Beatrice’s borrowed, upcycled gown, chosen less than two weeks before her wedding, reminds us that happiness is ours to be had. That now is a time of mourning and austerity but not of sadness alone.

In this light, we can read Beatrice’s wedding dress as a gentle nudge to Keep Calm and Marry On.