“Oh, look! It’s Kate Wins­let’s wed­ding dress!”

On the night of the roy­al wed­ding, while most of us were drink­ing gins and mak­ing snarky tweets about Prin­cess Beatrice’s hat (or poin­tedly not), fash­ion design­er Jane Yeh was hard at work furi­ously sketch­ing and sew­ing a rep­lica of Kate Middleton’s wed­ding dress, ready to go on dis­play at 3pm the next day.

The dress is doing a roy­ale tour of New Zea­l­and, and Monday saw it on dis­play at Farm­ers on Lamb­ton Quay. I could­n’t res­ist the lure of a pretty frock.

Reverence

There were tales of queues at the gown’s week­end appear­ance at Queens­gate, but the down­town scene was much quieter. A few ladies stood around, some were quite excited by it, while oth­ers did­n’t seem to know whose dress it was (see above).

There was a tie-in offer to rep­lic­ate the wed­ding makeup look, but you know what? Kate Middleton was wear­ing pretty heavy makeup. It was deep, dimen­sion­al tele­vi­sion makeup. Not the sort of thing that most brides – let alone ordin­ary people – need to both­er with.

It’s a nice dress. It’s not an exact rep­lica of the Duch­ess of Cam­bridge’s gown, though it’s a decent enough approx­im­a­tion for some­thing knocked up in one night.

It did­n’t quite have the magic­al aura that Kate Middleton seemed to have walk­ing down the aisle, but maybe that’s the secret – it’s not just the dress, it’s the per­son in it.

Faux bow

As well as the rep­lica dress, a rep­lica set of the crown jew­els were also on dis­play. These were ori­gin­ally made for Farm­ers to cel­eb­rate the Queen’s dia­mond jubilee in 1977. This makes me happy for two reas­ons:

1) Simply that such things exist. It’s a bit of a rem­nant from a time when it was less afford­able for New Zeal­anders to vis­it the real crown jew­els in Lon­don, when a rep­lica set would have drawn the same sorts of crowds that the dress does today.

2) That 34 years later, there’s still someone at Farm­ers who remem­bers they have a set of rep­lica crown jew­els some­where around. Or maybe the CEO uses them all the time. “You want me to sign off on the new brand­ing? You’ll have to rub my orb first.”

Crown

The dress and accessor­ies con­tin­ue their tour of New Zea­l­and, includ­ing vis­its to the dual dis­aster zones of Christ­ch­urch and Albany. And that seems like a rather roy­al thing to do.