It’s not an exaggeration to say that Meghan Markle’s custom Givenchy wedding dress was the dress seen around the world. It was—the BBC estimated that May’s royal wedding, where Markle wed Prince Harry, reached 1.9 billion people globally.
The design was minimal and classic: It featured an open bateau neckline, three-quarter-length sleeves, and an A-frame silk organza skirt with a sculpted waist. Topping it all off was a 16-and-a-half-foot silk veil embroidered with the 53 flowers of the British Commonwealth. The person behind it all? Clare Waight Keller, the British designer who, in 2017, became the first female artistic director of the French fashion house.
Keller recalled the moment she learned of her commission to Eva Chen, at Vogue’s Forces of Fashion conference today. At the time, she had only been at Givenchy for roughly six or seven months. “The commission itself was really quite a moment for me,” she said. “A huge thing for both my career but personally as well—being a Brit and being able to be a part of a piece of British history.”
She worked with Markle for five months, in secret, on the design. “It was a very discreet communication between us—literally just us. There was no one else involved,” she said. “For those five months, that was so special. It was an opportunity for me to get to know her.”
Throughout the process, Keller wanted to make sure that the dress reflected the Duchess of Sussex and her values. That it felt personal—it was her and Prince Harry’s wedding day, after all. But they also both knew that, due to the enormity of the moment, it needed to be something that was, well, iconic.
“It was quite an overwhelming moment to think, ‘I have to really decide with her exactly the right thing that everyone, the world, was going to watch,’ ” she said.
The veil, with its intricate hand embroidery, was made with particular care. “There was a whole story going around the entire length,” Keller told Chen. She filled an entire fitting with hand-drawn papers with flowers, meticulously studying their patterns and feels. When deciding the final designs to choose, she leaned toward wildflowers, meadow flowers, and even grasses. Keller felt they were poetic. “I wanted to portray something that felt a little bit more humble, because I think she is very humble as a person,” she said.
On May 19, when Kensington Palace announced she designed the dress, much attention was paid to the fact that Keller was the first female designer of Givenchy. But Keller said that she thinks of herself first and foremost as a designer, period—though that doesn’t mean the significance is lost on her. She noted her time at Gucci, where she worked 24/7 with newborn twins. “That was really tough,” she admitted. “You will make compromises all the time with your life and work balance. You have to make choices. But those choices, I don’t ever look back and regret them.”
There are fashion moments. There are historical moments. And, just over a year after taking the reins at Givenchy, Keller has managed to accomplish both.
Go Behind the Scenes at the 2018 Forces of Fashion Conference
