Lace, the Wedding dress and Fashion Museum, Bath

There’s a certain Royal Wedding in Great Britain this weekend, you may notice, and once again much attention is focused on what the bride, and groom, and the royal family will be wearing.

A mannequin at the Fashion Museum, Bath, UK, wearing a woven silk wedding dress with lace embroidered silk net.
Photo by Lucia Carpio for My Fashion Connect Global

Exhibits at the 2017 Lace exhibition, at the
Fashion Museum, Bath, UK.

According to the Fashion Museum in the historical town of Bath, lace was very much an important trimming featured on the wedding dress and as a veil of the bride, ever since the early 1800s.  Queen Victoria gave the trend a royal approval when she wore a white Spitalfields silk dress with Honiton lace at her own wedding in 1840.

Currently one exhibition that is of particular significance this year at the Fashion Museum in Bath highlights the strong link between royal women and their fashion.

One of the key exhibits there at the Royal Women exhibition is the 1863 wedding dress of Alexandra, The Princess of Wales.  It is described as an excellent example of a ceremonial object marking a key moment in both the life of Alexandra and Great Britain.

The exhibition spans four generations of Britain’s royal women, and explores how their royal roles influenced their choice in dress.

Royal Women is on at the Fashion Museum in Bath until 28 April 2019.

Fashion Museum Bath to launch Royal Women exhibition in 2018

With the world’s most loyal royal watchers anticipating the society wedding of 2018 when UK’s Prince Harry will tie the knot with Meghan Markel, the Fashion Museum Bath  has timely announced that it is to stage a new exhibition in 2018, “Royal Women”, celebrating fashion worn by successive generations of women in the British Royal Family.

Fashion from the era of Queen Victoria are among the current exhibits at the Fashion Museum Bath.
Photo © Lucia Carpio 2017

The family tree exhibition will include clothing worn by Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret, featuring items of dress from the Fashion Museum collection, as well as a major loan from the Royal Collection, lent by Her Majesty The Queen.

Open from February 3, 2018, to April 28, 2019, the “Royal Women” exhibition will examine their sartorial lives, looking at each woman’s unique style, the role they played within the monarchy and how that was reflected in their choice of dress.

Highlights include the wedding dress of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, a dress and cape made by Hartnell worn by Queen Mary to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, and a grey silk satin ball gown worn by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

There are also a number of Christian Dior dresses as worn by Princess Margaret including a ‘Rose Pompom’ strapless cream silk chiffon day dress worn to Royal Ascot and a strapless black lace evening dress worn to a performance of Guys and Dolls at the London Coliseum in 1953.

Lace dresses have long been favoured by royal women, including 1950s style icon Princess Margaret and today's Duchess of Cambridge.  Photo © Lucia Carpio 2017 at the highly acclaimed Lace in Fashion exhibition
at Fashion Museum Bath in 2017.

Elly Summers, the exhibition curator, said: “The Fashion Museum is one of the world’s great museum collections of historical fashionable dress and we are immensely fortunate that amongst its treasures it includes dress belonging to members of the Royal Family; we are equally fortunate in the loan of key pieces from the Royal Collection.”