Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi: The Intimate Royal Wedding That Rewrote the Plan

Princess Beatrice’s wedding was not supposed to look like this.

There was meant to be a ceremony at the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, followed by a reception in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

Then 2020 happened.

Instead, Beatrice married Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in a tiny private ceremony at Windsor, wearing one of her grandmother Queen Elizabeth II’s vintage Norman Hartnell gowns and the same diamond tiara the Queen had worn on her own wedding day.

Honestly, the emergency version may have become the more memorable one.

A royal wedding completely rewritten

Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi married on July 17, 2020, at the Royal Chapel of All Saints at Royal Lodge in Windsor.

Their original wedding had been scheduled for May 29 at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, with a private reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

COVID restrictions forced those plans to be abandoned.

So instead of the large royal event that had originally been imagined, the couple celebrated with a very small group of close family.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were among those present.

The dress belonged to the Queen

And then there was the dress.

Rather than commissioning an entirely new couture gown, Beatrice borrowed a vintage Norman Hartnell dress from her grandmother.

Queen Elizabeth had worn the gown publicly in the 1960s, including to the London premiere of Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.

Originally sleeveless and considerably fuller through the skirt, it was adapted for Beatrice by Angela Kelly and Stewart Parvin.

Short organza sleeves were added, embellished with vintage diamanté to echo Hartnell’s original embroidery, while the silhouette was softened and simplified.

Even better: the alterations were designed to be reversible.

So technically, this was not simply “vintage-inspired.”

It was actual royal vintage.

Queen Mary’s Fringe Tiara

The jewellery carried even more family history.

Beatrice wore Queen Mary’s Fringe Tiara, made in 1919 from diamonds originally belonging to a necklace given to Queen Mary by Queen Victoria.

The same tiara had been worn by Princess Elizabeth — the future Queen Elizabeth II — when she married Prince Philip in 1947.

Princess Anne later wore it for her own wedding in 1973.

And then, more than seventy years after her grandmother’s wedding, Beatrice wore it again.

That is the sort of “something borrowed” the rest of us are simply not going to compete with.

A very different kind of royal bridal look

What I love about Beatrice’s wedding look is that nothing about it feels like an attempt to manufacture an iconic royal wedding dress.

There is no enormous train. No newly commissioned couture spectacle. No dress designed around the expectation that millions of people will watch the bride emerge from a carriage.

And yet the result is extraordinarily distinctive.

The geometric diamanté embroidery, the organza sleeves, the vintage proportions and the tiara give the entire look a kind of old-world eccentricity that feels completely appropriate for Beatrice.

It also looked like something that belonged to a family rather than merely something borrowed from a fashion house for one afternoon.

The flowers

The small ceremony still included very traditional royal wedding flowers.

Beatrice carried a bouquet containing pale pink and cream sweet peas, ivory spray roses, pink garden roses, jasmine, wax flower and astilbe.

And, following the longstanding royal tradition, the bouquet also contained sprigs of myrtle.

The same soft pink-and-cream palette appeared in the floral arch surrounding the entrance to the chapel.

After the ceremony, the bouquet was placed on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, continuing another royal bridal tradition.

Small did not mean insignificant

There is something slightly wonderful about the fact that one of the most unusual British royal weddings of recent decades happened almost by accident.

There was no enormous procession and no balcony moment.

Instead, there was a little chapel, family, flowers gathered into an almost cottage-garden palette, a grandmother’s dress and a tiara carrying more than a century of royal history.

For a wedding created under restrictions, it ended up containing an extraordinary amount of family symbolism.

The RCW verdict

If Beatrice had married according to the original plan, I suspect we would still have had a beautiful royal wedding.

But we might not have had this wedding.

The borrowed Hartnell gown and Queen Mary’s tiara turned what could have felt like a compromised ceremony into something much more personal.

And frankly, I prefer that story.

A royal bride wearing her grandmother’s actual evening dress, altered just enough to become a wedding gown, is considerably more interesting than yet another perfectly respectable new white dress.

Sometimes Plan B gets the better wardrobe.