Love, Desire and Riches – The Fashion of Weddings. Rippon Lea House and Gardens, 192 Hotham Street, Elsternwick, until September 30. Book here or phone 9656 9804
Bridal is Voxfrock’s favorite Dress Code. We’ve been known to weep over a nice wedding white: an ivory, egg or whipped-white cream in, say, a glorious spill of silk, a rustling duchess or long fluttery breath of mousseline. We swoon over drifts of spidery lace or whole dillybags of softglint paillettes or crystals strewn – just so – over elegantly corsetted breasts and hips.
Crystal Queen Swarovski,
by Collette Dinnigan, 2007
Bridal is fashion’s pinnacle challenge, offering every couturesque trick and tool of full-throttle over-the-sparkling-rainbow expression, but in reality, demanding a certain genius and intelligent restraint, a reverence for the roles of love and femininity in the arts and practices of getting hitched.
We are waffling, of course, by way of introduction to The National Trust of Victoria’s most extraordinary, heartflutteringly lovely, Love, Desire & Riches – The Fashion of Weddings Exhibition. It opened this week in the gobsmackingly beautiful rooms of Melbourne’s Ripponlea historic mansion.
Gillian Anderson plays the tragic Miss Havisham in Annie Symons wedding gown for the 2011 BBC production of Great Expectiations, Charles Dickins
More than 50 gowns were curated by Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna from designer, museum, private and film and television archives and collections to tease out the backstories, “the intersection…the social narrative” behind the fashions of marriage.
HRH Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece wears opulent Valentino for her marriage to Prince Pavlos, 1995.
Among the most remarkable, a Valentino gown worn by Princess Marie Chantal to Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece is a magnificent 25-dressmaker, $200,000 counterpoint to the urban meringue worn by Kylie Minogue in her Neighbours “wedding” to Jason Donovan. Both fit fascinatingly perfectly into their respective contextual love stories.
Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan get hitched in one of the most popular episodes in Neighbours history.
The ingenius arts of bridal couture are also delicately represented in gowns by our local fashion magicians, among them Gwendolynne Burkin, Akira Isogawa, Toni Maticevski, Collette Dinnigan.
Now, we feel we have exhausted all the appropriate superlatives for our favorite fashion genre except, perhaps, this one: Unmissable.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
