Revisiting Grace Kelly’s $623,000 Wedding Dress, Which Inspired Kate Middleton’s Gown

The Gist

• Grace Kelly’s wedding dress, designed by Helen Rose, remains one of the most iconic bridal looks in history.

• The elegant gown featured an antique lace bodice and silk faille skirt, embroidered with thousands of tiny seed pearls.

• The dress is preserved in a Philadelphia museum—and worth an estimated $623,000 today.

Grace Kelly set the tone for generations of brides with her 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. One of the 20th century’s most-watched events, every detail—from her hair and the towering cake to the star-studded guest list—became a hot topic in the cultural zeitgeist, as well as an aspirational example for brides-to-be. Kelly’s stunning Helen Rose wedding dress landed in the center of it all. It’s a garment rare and memorable enough to be known as the Grace Kelly dress—no small achievement, given her lifetime of unforgettable looks.

Royal elegance and Hollywood glamour came together in the now-iconic gown. Boasting long sleeves, a high neckline, and a feminine silhouette hewn from lace and silk, it’s served as the bridal blueprint for everyone from Kate Middleton and Miranda Kerr to Paris Hilton. In Rose’s 1976 autobiography, Just Make Them Beautiful: The Many Worlds of a Designing Woman, the costume designer described it as “the most expensive wedding gown I had ever made.”

No expense could be spared for a spectacle of this magnitude; it was even filmed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to be preserved for generations to come. Before Princess Diana captivated a global audience with her nuptials to then-Prince Charles in 1981, Kelly had the world watching Monaco as an actress became a princess—a truly 20th-century fairytale.

Here’s everything to know about Grace Kelly’s wedding dress, from its design and cost to where it is now.

The dress was a parting gift from her studio.

In the months leading up to her wedding, Kelly was taking her final bow in Hollywood. She wrapped shooting on rom-com High Society just weeks before her nuptials to Prince Rainier, even wearing her real-life Cartier engagement ring in the film. Her longtime studio, MGM, gave her a Helen Rose wedding gown as a gift, per People.

Six years earlier, the same MGM execs had gifted Elizabeth Taylor a Helen Rose original for her 1950 wedding to Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. Rose had also worked with Kelly on several of her films prior to her 1956 wedding, including The Swan and Green Fire.

It took six weeks and over 30 seamstresses to make.

Creating a gown fit for a princess was a full-time affair. Rose and a team of over 30 seamstresses worked around the clock to fashion Kelly’s dress in a little over a month. The Philadelphia Art Museum, which came into possession of the gown following the wedding, notes on its website that the “dress itself is constructed in four complex parts” including the lace bodice and underbodice, the silk faille skirt with multiple petticoats, the train insert, and the cummerbund which wrapped around Kelly’s waist.

It features 19th-century lace and thousands of seed pearls.

A host of fine materials went into the making of the iconic wedding gown. Rose point lace, a relic of 19th-century Brussels, formed the bodice of the gown. It was also crafted from a variety of silks, including peau de soie, taffeta, and faille, with hundreds of yards of silk net and val lace required for both gown and veil, per WWD.

As for the details, embroiderers and beaders hand-sewed thousands of gleaming seed pearls to the dress bodice, veil, shoes, and the prayer book Kelly carried down the aisle with her. At the back of the dress, which Rose maintained was the most important angle given that it would be seen the longest while the bride stood at the altar, three bows fasten the skirt below the cummerbund.

Equally as impressive as the elaborate wedding dress is its veil, which features two small love birds done in lace, according to a WWD article from the time. Seed pearls and rose point lace trace its hem, but the tulle veil was famously left unadorned where it covered Kelly’s face so as not to obscure it. Unlike other royal brides, Kelly skipped the tiara for her nuptials, wearing instead a Juliet cap (a dainty lace and pearl headdress, to which the veil was affixed).

It’s valued at over $600,000 today.

Kelly’s wedding dress isn’t just a beautiful gown—it’s a piece of royal and Hollywood history. Per WWD, it cost $65,200 to make originally. Today, it’s worth an estimated $623,000, putting it among the ranks of the most expensive wedding dresses of all time. For comparison, Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding gown for her 1947 nuptials is valued at $1.6 million today.

Kelly donated it to a museum in her hometown after the wedding.

While Kelly lived out her remaining days in Monaco, the dress came back to the States. She donated it to the Philadelphia Art Museum, located in her hometown. In 2006, on the 50th anniversary of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier’s wedding, the museum displayed the gown and other artifacts from the ceremony in the exhibition “Fit for a Princess: Grace Kelly’s Wedding Dress.”

Read the original article on InStyle