“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.