It didn’t stop there. The bride also offered to make her childhood friend Celeste Sykes, who would act as the celebrant, an outfit, as well as dressing her sisters, her parents, her father- and brother-in-law, several more friends, and her groom. Hattie says working on all the custom designs provided cherished moments of intimacy with her friends and family before the big day. “It was a really lovely series of moments that really brought us closer and allowed us to get excited together.”
Hattie’s girlfriends all love color, she says, “so they each chose their favorite color in 12 ½ oz linen and I sketched out styles.” One wanted a three-piece suit, another copied a loose-fitting suit in a style Hattie often wears, another had a Jackie O-style minidress in mind, and the fourth wanted a high-neck top with buttons up the back, with matching trousers and shawl. “My favorite thing was making my friends feel amazing,” says the bride. “They’d come in for a fitting, we’d have some drinks, then I’d basically force them all to hang out.”
Harry’s brother requested a single-breasted suit in a navy Loro Piana seersucker fabric, and his father a lightweight blue linen, while Hattie’s own father, Simon (who, as a director of the British cloth merchant Dugdale Bros & Co, is a veteran suit wearer), chose a navy wool, worn with braces. The groom had a touching reference point: a picture he’d seen of Hattie’s grandfather wearing a grey suit on his wedding day. In the end he opted for a dark brown 10oz tropical wool in a double-breasted style, with a wide lapel, and straight-leg trousers with a slightly higher rise. His wife-to-be also made him a cream shirt, and found a vintage Celine tie on Vinted for $50. His father gifted him a pearl tie pin to complete the look.
Perhaps inevitably, given how busy she was making everyone else’s outfits, Hattie’s own main bridal look almost came unstuck. “I stupidly left my dress pretty late—my fitting was two weeks before.” Her design was a high-necked jacket—fastened with 48 vintage glass buttons discovered on a sourcing trip at Sunbury Antiques Market—that opened to expose her midriff, and a long, flowing skirt. But the jacket sleeves turned out to be uncomfortably tight, leaving her with a decision to make: either chop the sleeves off, or “we had a tiny bit of extra fabric…” In the end, HAX’s alterations tailor turned them into “amazing bell sleeves,” and the fix turned out to be a perfect save. “I should have done it from the beginning,” the bride says now. “It turned out to be amazing.”
There was another near disaster when, two weeks out from the wedding, the couple learned their venue couldn’t accommodate them. But a friend offered an alternative: a derelict gymnasium behind his house, filled with 60 years’ worth of debris, rubble, and old possessions. “Thank God we have extremely useful friends—one is a builder. He came along with some of his team and we cleared it all out and knocked an archway through our friend’s garden.” It was another change of plan that worked out for the best. “It was really, really beautiful, and we were so touched by how amazing our friends had been. It was a lovely way to go into our marriage.”
