“ABOVE all, the 60s were a decade of iconic wedding dresses”, said The Wedding Secret Magazine website last year as it surveyed celebrity wedding dresses of that colourful decade, modelled by, amongst others, Lulu, Mia Farrow, Yoko Ono and Cilla Black.
Fashion had generally become “youthful, fun and daring, dresses were shorter, colours were bolder and mod prints were all the rage”, the magazine pointed out.
Liz Taylor had helped blaze a trail when, marrying Richard Burton in 1964, she wore a knee-length, marigold-hued, empire-line dress. And when Lulu got hitched to Maurice Gibb in February 1969, she wore, in deference to the cold, “an ankle-length fur-trimmed coat topped with an exaggerated hood, and made fashion history”.
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When Cilla Black married her manager, Bobby Willis, at a registry office in January 1969, she wore a mini, burgundy-coloured velvet dress she had bought for £8, two years earlier, and which she had shortened for her big day.
The couple then had a white wedding at a church in early March, and Cilla opted for a mini-length white jersey wool dress with ostrich feather trim around the neck and the wrists – “a sixties marvel by [designer] John Bates”, one knowledgeable fashion writer enthused a few years ago.
That same year, when Linda Eastman married Paul McCartney, she favoured, according to the Evening Times, “a yellow coat over a fawn dress, with brown stockings and chunky brown shoes”.
Something of this freewheeling approach to wedding fashions in the late 1960s can be seen in this photograph, from a wedding show staged by the well-known Glasgow store, Daly’s. The wedding-guest outfit in the middle was an “elegant” beige suit selling for 42 guineas.
The tunic outfit on the right could be yours for 19 guineas and was, said a Glasgow Herald fashion writer, intended for the “avant-garde wedding guest”. Daly’s also offered an “eye-catching” mini-wedding dress, for 23 guineas.
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