It doesn’t seem that long ago that Kate Middleton popped up wearing that gorgeous blue Issa dress to match the iconic engagement ring given to her by long-time boyfriend Prince William; the amazing 18-carat sapphire with a diamond halo was originally given to his mother, Princess Diana, by his father, Prince Charles almost 30 years ago. In fact, the couple was only engaged for six months (although they had been dating for several years prior), so it’s even more amazing that they were able to set up the elaborate wedding at Westminster Abbey that viewers around the world witnessed a few short days ago.
If you missed it, you might be the only one (NBC alone reported more than 52 million viewers), but you can certainly find loads of video and photos online (Yahoo, which has touted its coverage leading up to the event, fielded 50,000 content requests per second on Friday and received a total of over 400 million page views). But anyway, here’s the basic recap: the wedding consisted of a lot of crazy hats and international guests, celebrities like David and Victoria Beckham and Sir Elton John, the Queen clad in buttercup yellow from head to foot, a lovely veil, a horse-drawn carriage, a parade route lined with well-wishers, and a spectacularly chaste “first public kiss” on a balcony at Buckingham Palace (although the kiss was actually about twice as long as the peck shared by Charles and Diana), followed by a surprise second kiss. It did not include any terrorist attempts, thank goodness.
The dress was Alexander McQueen, created by the late designer’s successor, Sarah Burton, and styled after the one worn by Grace Kelly (no long train a la Princess Di). And the tiara, a 1936 halo created by Cartier, was on loan from the Queen’s collection. Dr. Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, called for all those watching to support and uphold the newly wedded couple, there was a rousing rendition of “God Save Our Queen” (well, okay, that part was actually pretty subdued), and amazingly, no one in the wedding party shed a single tear. All in all, it was a beautiful, spectacular, and largely uneventful day (if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of people who came out to witness the event in person and the millions who watched on TV).
