Princess Madeleine’s wedding dress is one of the most celebrated of recent royal weddings. The bride herself talked openly about how her wedding dress was designed. The Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani had asked her if he could create her dress. And the princess said the meetings with the designer were “rather funny”.
(Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, Wiki Commons)
In an interview, ahead of a big royal exhibition in 2019, Princess Madeleine spoke about designing her wedding dress. As a friend of the princess, Valentino Garavani had suggested that he should create her wedding dress. The princess said it felt “natural” that he would be the one to create her dress. She also said that it was a “very exciting process”.
(Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, Wiki Commons)
Valentino Garavani brought several sketches to Princess Madeleine so she could pick which style she preferred. According to the princess, she immediately knew what she wanted her dress to look like. The pair only met up two times to make adaptions and make the dress fit. However, these two meetings seemed to legendary.
Princess Madeleine told the story in the interview: “It was rather funny. He brought his pugs, and they sat on the dress everywhere. The poor Italian seamstresses were pulling their hair out. So it was a very funny process, to make the dress.”
(Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, Wiki Commons)
Princess Madeleine’s wedding dress was made in the Valentino atelier in Paris. When Princess Madeleine had her last fitting just hours before the wedding, the dress was all of a sudden too large. “I felt like Cinderella, because the dress is 1,40 metres long and the Italian seamstresses were running around like small mice and sewed up the dress to make it fit. Dad [King Carl Gustaf] was waiting on the threshold very patiently while I was getting very nervous when they were still sewing the dress when the church bells rang.”
(Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, Wiki Commons)
Princess Madeleine admits she had lost some weight because of the nerves. She was a few minutes late to her own wedding.
The princess talked about her wedding dress in an interview for the documentary about the Swedish Royal Dresses “Kungliga brudklänningar” on SVT which was broadcasted in late May. The documentary can still be watched here.
