Do posh wedding guests have any more clue than we do?

[MontyDonsBlueSuit]

Looking at the coverage of Peter Phillips’ wedding I’m amazed by some of the outfits. Clearly a lot of these people have money but it really doesn’t show - some of the choices look very unstylish to me. Creased dresses, raffia wedges, mismatched accessories. I appreciate it was a rubbish day weather-wise so may have needed a few last minute rethinks but what hope is there for the rest of us when even those with access to the best designers and a presumably healthy budget look pretty average at best.

You do realise you are on the Style & Beauty board ?

Are raffia wedges a fashion crime, then? 😦

Oh now I'm really curious about what you wore and why it was wrong!

They always were darling. 😅

I think they looked fine it was what I would expect people to wear for a wedding, nothing too revealing for the church, no one wants to see acres of flesh. This trend for black tie from across the pond is naff. Not sure Harriet needed to wear white as she has been married before as has Peter.

If you are looking for style, look at Dua Lipa she looked amazing in her Bianca Jaggeresque ensemble

It was quite nice to see a wedding where people were wearing the sorts of things I consider suitable-not what I consider evening wear!

She's an NHS nurse who sends her kids to a £60k a year boarding school. Yes she might have had some workmates there, but she clearly isn't in normal NHS social circles.

If I want to see some really hideous clothes there’s no better place than S&B 😂

I thought the guests looked fine. Perhaps someone can tell me what was that white ribbon/bit of fabric on Harriet’s tiara. Was it something to do with the veil? I think it spoiled some of the photos. I thought her dress was lovely but a tad inappropriate. I loved Dua Lipa’s wedding outfit so chic.

Appearances aren't important. All that matters is to be clean and somewhat tidy, and even the latter is optional.

I have no time for people who bother about things like matching handbags with shoes. Haven't they got anything more interesting to think about?

I think PP’s have hit the nail on the head. Very few people, posh or not, care nearly as much about how they look as the posters on the Mumsnet Style and Beauty board.

Most people attending a wedding are happy to wear something presentable but unremarkable, worn before and comfortable. And then get on with either enjoying the day or hide around the back of gazebo with a Jilly Cooper (we all saw you Auntie Angela.)

DH and I had a wide range of ‘types’ and numerous nationalities at our wedding and, aside from his Italian boss with his immaculate wife and children, our guests could best be described (and were by my charming brother) as ‘a ramshackle bunch of rahs.’

It was an "English country wedding" so I think most of the guests were appropriately dressed for that occasion tbh.

I think the matching handbag obsession tends to overlap with the over-inflated lips, acrylic nails and frozen botox face type of women. Which thankfully wasn't present here.

Weddings bring together all shapes, sizes, ages and budgets. Surprise - they were all represented at this wedding. Unlike on the pages of fashion websites.

They have nothing to prove. So don’t care too much.
They do wear garments from the owners ( also at the wedding) of high end shops out of some sort of solidarity of sorts.
Some won’t be remotely interested in a put together look.
Since Diana we sort of seem to expect anyone aristocratic to be super skilled at dressing themselves. She was a one off. The Princess of wales has someone who suggests outfits for her. Many of the others won’t.
And often come from families where being slightly eccentric is perfectly normal.

It doesn't take that much thought

There is a great book called Watching the English written by a social anthropologist called Kate Fox, she said all matching very much denotes the working class. She does cover clothes, It’s a great book and I thoroughly recommend it. I like DH Norwegian branch of the family loads as they bowl up in traditional dress at family weddings and then get very drunk in a jolly way. My Chinese side of the family sometimes wear Cheongsams to weddings though not many now. Now there is pressure at those, I’m a size 10 to 12 and the biggest size Auntie by far on the Chinese side.

Another one was Dua Lipa who got married in a Schiaparelli suit and suddenly there are thousands of people online slagging off the cut, the fabric etc

It was an objectively bad fit - you just needed a pair of eyes to see the buttons pulling, the corset showing under the jacket, crooked seams.

It was a real shame because the concept of it was AMAZING and she looked fabulous. But the suit should never have left the atelier looking like that.

I thought ftom a few seconds glimpse on tv that camilla was wearing ivory, my immediate thought was MN s&b will go batshit, over that, but apparently it was pale yellow. Which is probs OK.

It was a piece of confetti/rose petal that had landed on the tiara or veil.

I thought posh (British) people always looked frumpy and rumpled? I thought that was the point of posh people? Not the nuclear Royal Family of course whose business it is to be well-ironed and sort-of stylish in a repressed lunatic asylum sort of way but other poshos? Remember Eugenie's hat?

Yes.

I've just had a look at some of the images that Vanity Fair had and I think for the most part, they look lovely. Other than a few odd choices that a very dark and look more like they're attending a court hearing than a wedding, there's some really lovely outfits on the whole.

Appearances are hugely important to most people I know. I love clothes and fashion. Being merely ‘clean and tidy’ just doesn’t cut it.

And no stylish person with an interest in fashion would match their shoes to their bag.

If you have no time for us, why are you on the S&B board?

Of course appearances are important. It doesn’t mean everyone has to dress the same, or be fashionable or stylish, but what you wear and how you look communicates a great deal about you, and you can’t opt out of that by considering such things beneath you.

One of the most interesting aspects of that - and one that’s a regular topic on this board, one way or another, with weddings being perhaps the most hotly debated focus - is how those signals are intended and received, by different audiences.