Ajay the tailor speaks about the flower girl dresses

[Orangefir]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11620179/Tailor-centre-Meghan-Kates-bridesmaid-dress-row-speaks-out.html

No surprises here. Days before the wedding the dresses didn’t fit. Couture gowns, made by Givenchy from measurements sent in. This tailor worked day and night but they had all six dresses to fix. It’s obvious they couldn’t get it all done. They really needed remade.

I think we can see why Kate was upset and why Charlottes dress and some of the other younger flower girls dresses looked awful.

Hardly going to get a second outing - apart from being put on display in at least two places as part of an exhibition of wedding clothes?

It was mentioned on one of these threads that it looked like they might have tried to address this by taking Charlotte's dress up at the shoulders. The picture of it on the dummy taken from the front show that the shape is a little off, like the start of the neck curve is missing and it gapes at times like it's too wide.

I agree with @Margrethe . For context, I used to make historic costume, so have a lot of experience sewing fancy frocks, including entirely by hand. It's next to impossible to alter the armholes and the neckline, because the fabric you need to make these smaller is no longer there.

Even nipping in the waist isn't that easy. On these dresses, the bottom of the bodice joins onto a waistband, then the skirt joins into that. To take that waistband in, you have to remove it from both bodice and skirt. But that leaves the bottom of the bodice and the top of the skirt too big to put back on the waistband.

The skirt is easier to fudge. It was probably pleated in anyway. For knife pleats or box pleats (the latter is what Catherine's bridesmaids dresses have) the top of the skirt needs to be three times the length of whatever you're fixing it to.
For gathers, less. For cartridge pleats more, sometimes significantly more. If you change the pleat style or overlap the pleats you'll change on how the skirt flares. But it's fudgeable. Having said that, one of the photos of Charlotte shows this was botched - the centre line of the pleats is off-centre on the dress itself, so it looks skewed.

The bodice is harder. It probably has side seams. If you take it in there, it impacts on the armhole size and shape. Which means you need to remove and then reset the sleeves. You can add extra darts elsewhere, but this changes the overall bodice design/shape, and may impact on neckline fit. You can gather the bottom of the bodice to the new smaller waistband. It looks like this last was done with Charlotte's dress but, again, not evenly.

Effectively, any significant alteration in size means you're taking the whole thing apart then rebuilding it. In a high shine, white fabric, which will show every mark. Where some of the fabric you need is just ... not there any more.

100% remake territory.

Wait, so he’s now named the friend?

I thought in the engagement interview they said they wanted to keep it confidential to protect her privacy?

If the price is right...

She'd been named in an article earlier too, but unconfirmed

Well explained @Motorina

Motorina looking at that pattern, once you’ve unpicked the bodice, for a sifgnificant difference in size like Charlotte’s dress, couldn’t you cut a smaller bodice out of the fabric of the larger one? Or is that what you mean be remake?

Yes, you could. But, if you're doing that, you're in remake territory anyway. The only advantage of doing that is saving the cost of new fabric. The disadvantage is you're using a piece of cloth which has already been handled and sewn once, so may be marked, and where how the fibres lay within the fabric may have been distorted. A bit like you can wrap a christmas present in reused paper, but the result will never be as crisp as new. Plus there's the time (and it's surprisingly time consuming) of unpicking the seams in a way that doesn't damage the fabric.

It'll save time and give a better result to start with a new piece of cloth. If the cloth is irreplacable, or you're working to a budget, then yes. But why would those apply here?

Is the implication then that Givenchy refused to go 'all hands on deck and bring in some extra manpower' for the remake? Or Meghan thought I don't want to look as though I'm following Kate's advice?

The real story is much more intriguing than the two women fall out before a wedding tale.

Yes it's totally intriguing how the dresses ended up far to big, why did they arrive so late and why didn't the designer / maker send a team to fix or remake them.

I'd have thought at that level of designing, you'd want your own dressmakers to do the alterations. Because really it's a very poor advert for Givenchy.

@Motorina reusing wrapping paper is a good way to describe reusing the same cloth. Never really thought about it that way.

It would also depend on whether the bodice had enough extra length. If it was too wide but not too long (or too long but not by enough) then you'd possibly be unable to avoid the neck hole which has similar issues to the armscye

The only thing I can think of is if the fabric was made to order and they didn’t have enough for the remake.

The girls will have been standing very close to Meghan and any difference in shade would have clashed with her dress.

Would have had to stand

excuse the dodgy grammar.

Very good point@ChardonnaysBeastlyCat about the colour of the bridesmaids dresses having to match the brides .

I'd expect it to be possible to track down something suitable in London - but it might have meant compromising on the exact type of fabric. Or they could have gone with a different shade entirely like a blush pink, but that would have changed the look. And it would only have been an option if they redid all the dresses.

I think Meghan probably just thought alterations would be fine. You can see why by this thread

I know, but different fabrics photograph differently and this wedding was very much about the photos.

i think remaking would have been best for fit, Bur there would have been other considerations as well.

That's what I was meaning by compromising - they'd have got a decent shade match, or a complementary shade, but it wouldn't have been the exact Givenchy look which was planned for.

The wedding dress and BM dresses were already different fabrics, albeit well matched

I have same questions @OutwiththeOutCrowd

Why didn’t Givenchy throw everything at it? Surely they would want to protect their brand in the world stage.

I can barely thread a needle to sew a button on but even I can see the logic of that. I think sometimes people can't see what they don't want to see. Isn't there a saying about it, something like None so blind as will not see? Anyway thank you it seems very clear.

The more they talk about this, the more bad they look. From their own version of things, Kate didn't 'make Meghan cry', she was trying to pass on advice from her dress maker and Meghan took this the wrong way and got annoyed. The fact that she later brought round flowers again makes Kate look like the one making an extra effort to get along, while Meghan just keeps insisting 'Everything is so difficult for me ... why isn't everybody thinking about me me me' That was still her attitude to the incident 3 years later on the Oprah interview!

I've lost sympathy with them because they're behaving exactly like the tabloids they hate so much - trying to spin villains and victims out of a complex situation in which there were clearly numerous misunderstandings and personality clashes.

It is bizarre, isn't it.

This is the sort of thing that's all dramatic and the end of the world when it happens, and that you actually laugh about afterwards.

The fact that she later brought round flowers again makes Kate look like the one making an extra effort to get along

It is interesting how different people have different takes on this. Personally, I’d agree with your interpretation that Kate sending flowers is trying to smooth things over when they’ve both probably been a bit unreasonable and both got a bit upset. However, there are plenty of people who see the flowers as evidence that the Kate was taking full responsibility and taking the blame.

I’ve seen the same thing in real life too - obstinate fools who see every gesture of peace as an admission of guilt and either won’t do it themselves, or use the other person’s gesture as evidence that they were right all along.

The weird thing in the interview was that she said, 'She did what I would do. She owned it.' Only Meghan apparently didn't own any part in it, and still doesn't. Judging by her string of failed relationships with her family, former husband, various friends, now her husband's family, there isn't much evidence of her ever making efforts to own her own part in something or make peace with anybody.

I've tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, because there are still people insisting that she's the victim of a racist press narrative, but the press didn't make up this narrative - that string of failed relationships is there for all to see. The press don't need to make up a narrative.