Kate Middleton’s wedding gown a huge draw

Record numbers of visitors toured Buckingham Palace this summer, and the main draw was Kate Middleton’s wedding dress.

The brochure from my visit to Buckingham Palace, where I attended the exhibit of Kate Middleton's Royal wedding dress.

To be honest, I didn’t go to Buckingham Palace in London this summer on some huge urge to see Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. After all, touring the State Rooms and viewing the Royal Fabergé exhibition was reason enough to pay the $28 per ticket. Oh, those eggs! But I must say, seeing the dress and learning about all that went into designing and creating it, well, it was breathtaking.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. During the summer opening of the State Rooms, which was held July 23-October 3, more than 600,000 visitors toured the palace. That’s a significant increase over the previous best of 420,000 visitors in 1994, and easily topped last year’s figure of 413,000, making it a 50 percent increase.

That was some dress

The Duchess of Cambridge’s £250,000 ivory and white satin-gazar dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen was eerily displayed in the Queen’s Ballroom. The dress was presented in the center of the dark ballroom, lit by spotlights with the veil hovering over a headless mannequin and making it appear a tad ghostly. Even the Queen Mum was taken aback when she first saw the exhibit. But if you could get past the spooky presentation, getting a close-up look at the dress and watching the short video that describes its creation, you were able to gain some understanding of why the thing cost more than a Ferrari.

In the video, Burton describes the intricate Grace Kelly-inspired lace bodice that was hand-stitched by the world’s best seamstresses at the Royal School of Needlework. The task was so hush-hush that reportedly the craftswomen had no idea what their commission was for. Burton explains that the Duchess had hands-on involvement and desired to create a gown with “presence and of historical importance” but one that had a contemporary feel.

“We wanted to look to the past, yet look to the future as well,” she says on the recording.

Shoes to die for

Then there are the shoes. Lordy, those shoes were impressive by any standard of women’s or men’s footwear. A close inspection reveals the shoes with lace detailing hand-stitched over ivory duchess satin to be size 5 1/2. Those are some dainty feet for a woman who stretches about 5 feet, 10 inches in height.