The Dress that Dreams are Made Of 

When it comes to the wedding dress, problems will pop up whether you’re a beggar or a Queen.

As the potential monarch of England, Princess Elizabeth was expected to put on a royal show on her wedding day despite the bleak economic outlook of the country which affected her as much as anybody else.

Fortunately, even governments seem to get a little sentimental at the mention of a wedding. To make a bride feel special during this period of recovery, each bride received extra clothing coupons. In the case of Princess Elizabeth, it was extra two hundred coupons.

With the material coupons in his hot little hands, Mr. Norman Hartnell, the designer of the dress, looked around to see where he could purchase that special material to make that special dress.

Like all artistes, nothing but the best would do. The bride’s mother begged him to please buy the satin from the famous silk worm farm at Lullingston Castle, right here in England. But powerful figure as she was to everyone else in the country, she could not prevail on Mr. Hartnell. In his considered opinion the material recommended by the Queen Mother might be good enough for the train, but as far as the rest of the dress was concerned, nothing but a fabric from a Scottish firm would do.

No sooner did he make his decision public, then a nasty rumour began to circulate. It seemed that the material being provided by the Scottish firm had been spun by, ‘enemy silk worms’ that might very well have come from a country that had had been warring with the allies just a few short years before.

Patriotic anger reached such heights that for a while it seemed that the wedding might have to be postponed altogether. But rising to the occasion, Mr. Hartnell was able to reassure the nation that the material had, indeed, been spun with the help of friendly little silk worms of Nationalist China, and not an enemy country at all.

On the wedding day the bride arrived looking like all brides are meant to look, radiant and happy. As for the dress, like so many royal dresses, it ended in a museum. And, it seems, despite Mr. Hartnell’s ingenuity as a designer, the Bride’s Mother did know best. Like all good housekeepers, she knew a good fabric when she saw it. Mr. Hartnell’s dress might have looked well on the day, but it didn’t keep half as well as it would have, had he bowed to her wishes and stayed with her choice of fabrics.

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