“Vienna Calling,” by Plum Sykes, was originally published in the September 2013 issue of Vogue.
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There was something delicious about arriving in my suite at the historic Hotel Sacher in the center of Vienna this past July, a few days before the wedding of Caroline Sieber and Fritz von Westenholz. Not only was my room upholstered in pink and dripping with chandeliers—paradise!—but a tempting slice of Sacher torte had been put on the table for me.
As I nibbled the chocolate cake, I noticed a small booklet on the bedside table. The words CARO: FRITZ were printed on the cover, surrounded by a charming Rex Whistler-inspired frontispiece—all cherubs, buds, and bows. I flopped onto the pink satiny bed and flicked through the pages. Inside was a long list of names—the guest list for the weekend. Oh—the Andres Santo Domingos were here. Heaven. Pippa Middleton was coming. And the actress Emma Watson. The Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley, and designers Erdem Moralioglu and Christopher Kane were expected. “I.D. Prinzessin Teresa zu Oettingen-Oettingen und Spielberg-Oettingen” sounded frightfully important.
I was in a state of excitement about my upcoming role as mother of the flower girls: My two daughters—Ursula, six, and Tess, three—had been asked to follow Caro up the aisle, along with eight other children, on the most important day of her life. It was an honor I had been wondering if they would live up to since last summer, when the request first came.
But to the bride: Caro Sieber, 30, born and educated in Austria, is a talented stylist, Chanel ambassador, and society swan. Often spotted delightfully dressed at parties in London (where she lives), Paris (where she often works), and New York (where she frequently visits and stays at the Carlyle), Sieber met Fritz at Boujis nightclub in London, and they dated for nine years before getting engaged.
Thirty-three-year-old Fritz is a witty, very tall, dark-haired Old Etonian with a famous sense of humor. When he recently met a friend of Caro s who was on the shorter side, he simply picked her up by the waist and lifted her into the air in order to say hello. He works in London in finance, but style is in his genes—his father, the baron Piers von Westenholz, of Austrian descent, is a well-known decorator. Fritz is not intimidated by Caro s immaculate taste, which is enhanced by her efficient, Germanic attention to detail. The guest list was just the first indication that perfection would be the only option at their wedding.
The day before the ceremony, I visited Caro at her parents town house in Vienna, once the home of Katharina Schratt, a famous actress and Emperor Franz Joseph s mistress. (The emperor s bathtub is still in the house.) She was sitting on the oval-shaped lawn, surrounded by beds of pink roses and lavender, having a mani-pedi while a remote-control automower cut the grass around her. Dressed in “one of Mummy s old Valentino dressing gowns” in blue-and-white striped silk, Caro, her long, bitter-chocolate-colored hair swirling around her shoulders as she sipped tea from a floral bone-china Augarten cup, was a bride-to-be in control.
She explained how her dress, which had required eleven fittings at the Chanel couture salon in Paris, had come about. She had always intended to wear Chanel at her wedding (Karl Lagerfeld admires her style), it was always going to be couture, and, this being Caro, she was always going to take the dress one step beyond fashion.
“Since I was a child, I ve loved the famous 1865 Winterhalter portrait of Empress Elisabeth, who was Emperor Franz Joseph s wife,” she said. “She was wearing a Worth gown with bare shoulders and romantic balloon sleeves made of a silvery-gray tulle.” She sent the image, as well as the 1955 movie Sissi, in which the Viennese actress Romy Schneider played Empress Elisabeth, to the Chanel couture salon for reference. She also sent the picture to Vogue s Hamish Bowles, asking for guidance. Bowles recalled that Lagerfeld had designed a similar sleeve for his baroque-inspired couture collection in 1985, two years after she was born.
On a visit to Paris, Caro tried the 1985 dress, went wild about the sleeves, and adored the Lesage embroidery of curling vine leaves that encircled the bodice, commissioning the same for her own dress. Inspired by all this fashion, history, and cinema, Chanel came up with “a dramatic silhouette,” recalled Caro. “The dress is narrow at the front, with the imperial Austrian-inspired sleeves, and a huge train!”
Just to complicate things, though this was to be a white wedding, Caro was determined not to let that tradition stand between her and her favorite color—blue. Her lifelong love affair with the hue borders on obsession: She has just had the front door of her house in London painted the same navy as her favorite Louis Vuitton SC bag. (She had the exact shade color-matched by Papers and Paints in Chelsea.)
After much research, Chanel presented her with the perfect fabric—silk-radzimir with a hint of gray-blue. A pale-blue satin sash and bow were added to the back of the dress. Chloé designer Clare Waight Keller created the flower girls dresses in blue silk to match the sash. She made white shirts with ruffled collars for the page boys, with beige silk breeches and matching cummerbunds.
“Oh! I must run,” said Caro suddenly, jumping up. She had a last meeting to attend with her wedding planners, followed by a rehearsal at the church.
That night, the groom s parents, Piers and Lofty von Westenholz, threw a party at a charming Vienna wine tavern, Mayer am Pfarrplatz, which was once the home of Beethoven. The dress code was Tracht—dirndls for the girls and lederhosen for the men. What a sight it was when I arrived! The little tavern, arranged around a vine-covered courtyard, was filled with Europe s most glamorous dressed as Austrian country folk. There were the Courtin-Clarins cousins, dressed in immaculate corseted dirndls in coordinating shades of fuchsia and red; Jemma Kidd was gorgeous in embroidered blue cotton and green trim; Emma Watson had paired her red gingham with a slash of scarlet lipstick. “I love Caro,” she told me. “She s styled me since I was fifteen!” Ice-cold beer flowed, mountains of sausages and schnitzel were eaten, and an atmosphere of extreme merriment was enhanced by guests attempting the traditional Austrian bash-the-nail-in-the-log game. (This guest attempted bashing the nail three times before whacking it.)
Mid-morning on the wedding day, I was driven with the other flower girls, pages, mothers, and nannies to the Michaelerkirche, one of Vienna s most ancient churches. Jemma Kidd, in a fifties-inspired gazar Emilia Wickstead dress, expertly shepherded her two children, three-year-old twins Mae and Darcy Mornington, and Rose Cholmondeley, dressed in skintight stretchy Alexander McQueen, kept admirable control of her twins, Oliver and Xan, also three. A crowd was starting to gather outside the church, whose stone porch was decorated with a staggeringly lavish arch of delphiniums. A supply of Haribo candies was produced to distract the little girls while delicate crowns of ivy were placed upon their heads and they waited for their big moment.
Finally it came. Caro arrived at the church with her father, Günter. A flowing net veil shrouded her face and the entire dress. The children were ordered to hold hands and process up the aisle in front of her. But it was not as simple as that. Tess did not want to hold hands with Ursula. “No!” insisted toddler Tess as various attempts were made to unite the sisters. Finally, to the glorious voices of a German boys choir, the Regensburger Domspatzen (the “Cathedral Sparrows”), singing Bach s “Air,” the troupe of children ventured up the aisle. Ursula s face was a picture of childish fury as she walked, setting off chuckles among the congregation. The other girls were tearing off their ivy crowns, and the boys were trying to undo their cummerbunds. “The children were the cabaret act,” decorator Nicky Haslam declared later.
I glimpsed Caro at the altar. Her hair, wound into an elaborate double braid and finished with a hairpiece of beaded vines by Laetitia Crahay with Lesage embroidery, looked romantic and soft. Her train spilled out around her in a beautiful pool; against the marble and stone of the church, the silk of her dress resembled the color of sunlight breaking through clouds; her sleeves puffed grandly. I was just thinking that Caro could have been a Hapsburg princess when Ursula asked too loudly:
“Mummy, have they kissed yet?”
“Shhh, darling!” I said.
“But when will they kiss?”
“Very soon,” I said, not even vaguely predicting the length of a Catholic wedding service.
Nearly two hours later, Caro and Fritz did finally kiss on the steps of the church. Flower petals were thrown, and the crowd had swelled, adding to the excitement. The wedding guests slowly emerged into the sunshine and wandered along the pretty Vienna streets to the reception at the Palais Pallavicini, a former imperial palace whose extravagant white marble-and-gold interior brimmed with huge vases of pink and white peonies. Caro had told me earlier that her florist, Doll of Salzburg, had ordered 4,000 peonies for the wedding. Along with the flowers, the air was scented at the church and reception with hundreds of Jo Malone Nectarine Blossom and Honey candles.
As champagne and fluffy Viennese cakes were proffered, I surveyed the guests: The fashion theme was one of strong color and sharp silhouettes. Lauren Santo Domingo was resplendent in red lace Dolce Gabbana and a short necklace of jawbreaker-size pearls; Emma Pilkington, in an exquisite white lace peplum dress, told me that her outfit was by a new designer called Sophia Kah (I resolved to look her up). Jacquetta Wheeler appeared extrawillowy in scarlet lace. Florence von Preussen was superneat in a cream Valentino shift with a black bow at the waist. Genevieve Hoberman looked bright and modern in fuchsia Roland Mouret. Emma Watson wore a tailored toile-print Carven dress, and Fritz s beautiful sisters, Victoria and Violet, were dressed in flirty florals. When I asked Camilla zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, a witness and one of Caro s greatest friends, who had made her sculptural black-and-white shift, she smiled sweetly and said, “It s Caro s!” It turns out that Caro s extensive wardrobe of party frocks had been widely distributed among her friends at the wedding.
That night, 200 guests were driven to a dreamy Schloss an hour from Vienna, owned by friends of the Sieber family. Fritz had arranged for the sound track to The Sound of Music to play as the coaches twisted up the mountain roads. We arrived to find the castle s vast lawns dotted with candles, little white sofas, men in tuxedos, and girls in long dresses. Big ball gowns were out; narrow dresses that trailed on the floor were in. Caro stole the show in a white net gown embroidered with violets that her friend Christopher Kane had made specially for her. “She sent me pictures of the wedding flowers, and we found a floral needlework design from a previous collection that matched,” Kane said. Rose Cholmondeley was draped nonchalantly in black satin by Vivienne Westwood; Lauren Santo Domingo wore Givenchy couture decorated with surreal beaded swans at the neck; Sophia Hesketh was in backless, black beaded Pucci; Jemma Kidd looked fabulous in a golden, feathered dress by new English couture designer Nicholas Oakwell. “You must stay until dawn, Plum,” Caro called out as she rushed past me. “Austrians stay up all night!”
As the light fell, dinner was served in the candlelit courtyard, which had been tented and filled with silver-birch trees. The tables were decorated with vases tumbling with peonies, sweet peas, daisies, and stocks. Little wreaths of ivy were wrapped around the napkins. The food—asparagus to start and rare beef to follow—was served on blue-and-white Herend china ordered in from Germany (there wasn t enough of it in Austria). Much attention was focused on Pippa Middleton, dressed alluringly in dramatic floor-skimming black, her hair scooped up in a high, sixties-style ponytail. A certain male guest had fallen for her in her dirndl the night before and begged Caro to change his placement so that he could be nearer to her. Best man Arthur Mornington made an amusing speech in which he informed guests that when Fritzi, as he refers to his childhood friend, had first met Caro that night in Boujis, he had told her he was Austrian, thinking this might increase his appeal. She had immediately started speaking to him in German, which he didn t understand because he doesn t speak a word of it, despite his roots. In desperation “he showed Caro the name tape in his shirt to prove he had an Austrian name,” recalled Arthur, to much laughter. The dance floor soon filled. Knowing we had a very early flight to catch the next morning, my husband and I reluctantly left the party at midnight.
As we checked out of our hotel room at 5:00 A.M. to head to the airport, we ran into a tuxedoed Italian princeling in the elevator. He was just returning from the party. “Hello. Goodnight,” he said, dazed. Other guests were emerging from cars and into the lobby, gossiping about their long night and heading for bed. As Caro had predicted, it had been a nuit blanche—with a little bit of bleue.
