In praise of Bella Freud and wedding dresses

I was standing in the vestibule of a little medieval chapel in Surrey waiting for my knickers to arrive. My dear friend and designer Bella Freud had designed me the most beautiful wedding dress of white linked wool that clung like a second skin, with a long, spiralling train. The thing was, it was a lot more revealing than I had anticipated and I had sent my old pal George back to London to get me the appropriate underwear. We were waiting. The people had assembled in the church and we were late, quite late and there was a general feeling of mounting anxiety as the clock ticked on. My future husband was reading poetry or writing a song or whatever is that he does at moments of stress or crisis. Eventually, George roared up the drive of the little medieval church, triumphantly waving the knickers out the window and I slipped them on, and we walked down the aisle and were married. As it turns out the back lighting in the church was such that little was left to the imagination anyway and George probably needn’t have bothered. But it was a happy day.

The day was the dress. It was the ceremony, of course, and the vows, but it was the dress too – that long, slinky, semi-transparent knockout of a dress, made by my dear friend Bella Freud. It’s the thing I remember. The dress.

Susie Cave wearing her wedding dress