In another time, she would have been the Queen of the Hellenes, and her wedding dress was befitting of a woman who should have held the title… but it was also firmly and beautifully designed to be the ‘90s royal wedding dress.
Marie-Chantal Miller married Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in London on 1 July 1995. Their marriage merged dynasties: Pavlos, the son of ex-King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie; Marie-Chantal, the middle daughter of an American-British billionaire who co-founded Duty Free Shops.
Embed from Getty ImagesTheir wedding day was one of the biggest royal events of the decade, and squashed the royal attendance of the 1981 wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer; more crowned heads and royals attended Pavlos’s and Marie-Chantal’s wedding. The last major royal event to compare to the Greek royal wedding was Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding in 1947.
And because of the auspiciousness of the occasion and the grandeur of the families, a suitable wedding dress was needed. The result: a couture Valentino dress that cost a reported £150,000 to make.
According to reports, 25 seamstresses worked round the clock to create Marie-Chantal’s ivory silk wedding dress. It took a reported four months to make and featured at least 12 kinds of lace.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe wedding dress featured a high neck and sleeves crafted from lace with floral appliqués flowing into a fitted bodice and full skirt of silk. Floral lace was also added to the bottom of the skirt.
Marie-Chantal topped off her wedding look with a 4.5 metre Chantilly lace train embroidered with butterflies and anchored by the Antique Corsage tiara, a loan from her new mother-in-law, Queen Anne-Marie.
In 2012, Marie-Chantal’s wedding dress was featured in an exhibition of Valentino’s work—next to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s 1968 wedding dress—in England.
