The big day of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles was billed as 'the wedding of the decade', and the dress didn't disappoint. Designers Elizabeth and David Emmanuel decided to aim for the stars with their creation, and Elizabeth recalled later, "We wanted her to look like no princess had ever looked before, so we set out to discover the length of the longest royal wedding dress train there’d been, and discovered it was 23 feet. We joked that we could go one better — in fact, two feet better — and make one that was 25 feet. She loved the idea."
The dress was made from ivory silk taffeta and Diana's "something old" was lace that had belonged to Queen Mary incorporated into the bodice. The gown was stitched with 10,000 seed pearls and mother-of-pearl sequins, while the voluminous puffed sleeves were decorated with hundreds of tiny ribbons, and the frilled neckline was set off with taffeta bows. Diana's "something blue" was a bow stitched into the underskirts of the dress, and the Emmanuels also stitched a tiny horseshoe into the underskirts for luck.
It's thought that the dress cost $12,000, which would be around $33,000 today.
