10/06/2024
The marriage of Hugh Grosvenor, the 7th Duke of Westminster, 33, to Olivia Henson, 31, at Chester Cathedral on Friday 7th June was the most anticipated society wedding of the year. With Prince William in attendance in the trusted role of usher.
Heir to a £10 billion fortune and with long ties to the royal family, Hugh (known as Hughie to friends) was Britain’s most eligible bachelor.
The Duchess wore a custom Emma Victoria Payne wedding dress and veil. The long sleeved gown was made in ivory silk with crepe satin and silk organza, featuring a scalloped edge neckline and open back with a bias-cut skirt.
The bespoke embroidery design on the bridal gown and veil was hand drawn and incorporates floral motifs and edgings from Olivia’s great great grandmother’s veil from around 1880.
Olivia wore the Faberge Myrtle Leaf Tiara, created in 1906. It was commissioned for Lord Hugh Grosvenor's wedding to Lady Mabel Crichton and has since been a favourite of Grosvenor brides.
The bride’s bouquet of flowers consists of meadow grass, Ox eye daisies, Iris, Rose, Clematis, Mock orange, Scabious, Sweet pea, Astrantia, Martagon lily and Love in a mist: all picked from Eaton Hall, the Grosvenor family seat.
Observers were quick to spot the bride’s choice of ‘something blue’ in her footwear. Velvet bowed shoes ‘Valentina’ by Spanish brand, Silvia Lago.
The tradition of the bride wearing something something blue comes from an Old English rhyme that dates back to 19th-century Lancashire. The Victorian era poem in full reads:
“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe.”
A sixpence was a British coin worth six pennies and was minted from 1551 to 1967.
They different items according to folklore tradition is meant to ward off the evil eye, which was thought to cause infertility.
