I’d got myself into a bit of a pickle. You see, my wedding was days away, and I didn’t have anything to wear. What I’d done, of course, was overthought it. One of the drawbacks of deciding to get married in your forties, having been with your partner for many decades, is that now you know too much. You have seen things that can’t be unseen – you have seen the way wedding photos age like milk, you have seen once-cool friends turn feral at the scent of lace, and you have seen divorce and grief, and the price of money. So when you turn, finally, towards your own wedding, the fantasies become foggier.
Having worn almost exclusively vintage since I was a teenager, I assumed something old and beautiful would make itself known to me. I needed two dresses I decided – one for the town hall bit and another for the party. I considered Ossie Clark, having had the most gorgeous and gossipy conversation with Celia Birtwell in her jewel-box of a cottage soon after David Hockney’s death – she reminded me, when choosing a dress, to concentrate on accentuating ‘your neat waist”, which made me sit up very straight and proud.
And I considered Vivienne Westwood, after spending a revelatory lunch hour in their dressing room, trying on silk gowns that dripped like cream down my body, giving the illusion of beauty, taste and wealth. In fact, after this, I hurriedly bought two Westwood dresses on Vinted for the price of a Marks & Spencer’s shirt, one structured, blush pink, the other coral and so fine you could hide it in the palm of your hand, but neither felt quite right – not dramatic enough, or extravagant, or (and this word echoed through my head for months, shifting meaning as it went) “weddingy”. A week after their arrival I wore the coral one to a modish gay bar in Dalston and spilt wine on it and that was that.
Then, two things happened. The first was when my friend Emma sent me an old photo of herself at an Oscars party in LA looking insanely beautiful in a slim white sheath dress, hand painted, studded with pearls, tiny buttons down the back, made by Zandra Rhodes in the early ’70s. And she said, ‘Would you like this dress?’ And I said, calmly, ‘Yes, please’. There was something fateful about it, even after I had to have it taken out at the back, and even after the dry cleaner refused to touch it as it was a “museum piece” so instead I washed it in a bucket on the patio. Which I thought, actually, was appropriately wifely.
Fretting about a second outfit over text with my friend Carrie, the pressures and the possibilities, my various agonies about marriage itself, the politics of a body, tradition as weapon, plus of course, spillages, she asked what I’d really like, and I recalled a dress I’d seen in the window of the JW Anderson Soho store a year or so earlier. It was more of a sculpture than a dress, almost an optical illusion, and I stood in front of it for some time, marvelling. The bodice narrowed to a nipped waist, where the hips extended as if a Disney gown, but angular and pleated, because these hips were (on closer inspection) the shoulders of a blazer, which hung to the knee as a wide skirt. The dress was a marriage in itself. And after a little while Carrie, who is friends with everybody, said something like, “I wonder if we could borrow it”. It hadn’t occurred to me, of course, that this piece of art could actually be worn, let alone bought. I held out little hope, until one day, a large orange garment bag arrived at my door. She had texted Jonathan Anderson, Carrie told me, and they had pulled it from the archive. I’m still not sure how to thank her. What’s the appropriate gift for a fairy godmother?
The wedding was days later. My partner and I had been vaguely mourning the lack of peril in our marriage – we were already locked down, kids, and house, and were concerned that a wedding needed some aspect of jeopardy to keep the crowd engaged. Perhaps, I squealed, the dress wouldn’t fit! Peril! I was vibrating slightly as I stepped into it, and the black velvet skirt spread at my hips. My mum, deep in my son’s Lego monologue, turned and gasped, almost tearful.
A photo my daughter took at the town hall as we got married shows the tiny pearl buttons down the back of my white dress, even older than our relationship, yet still a dull glint. And in my parents’s garden that Saturday in the JW Anderson gown, I felt as though I hovered over the scorched grass, quite grand and artful and happy. It was the dress, eventually, that gave me away.