Royal Wedding Dress Predictably Inspires Envy, Copying

Kate Middleton‘s wedding dress may meet its adoring public at some point in the future. Although the palace would give no indication where or when The Dress — which was worked on by lacemakers who washed their hands every half an hour, to keep their work pristine white — might be exhibited, but did say that HRH was considering “a number of options to give members of the public the opportunity to see close up the skilled British craftsmanship that went into the making of her wedding dress.” [Independent]
Meanwhile, every knock off artist and his brother is working to crank out copies of Middleton’s McQueen. (Some of the “inspired” versions are pictured above.) One couple in China has already gotten married in get-ups that were kind of Kate-and-Wills drag. [Fashionista]
Blind item! “Which hot fashion designer — perhaps upset that he didn’t get the call to design that dress — was spotted stumbling out of the Boom Boom Room, yelling, ‘Kate Middleton is a vanilla whore!’ on the eve of the royal wedding while his equally inebriated posse cackled?” [P6]

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Here’s one of Kate Moss‘s new ads for Dior Addict lipstick. David Sims shot them. [TLF]

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Kristen McMenamy is basically the coolest person ever, the end. [HuffPo]

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Here are 16 of Anna Wintour‘s old Met Ball outfits. [Fashionologie]

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• Cathy Horyn, on last night’s Met Ball: “The thing about the Costume Institute party is you have to keep moving. Otherwise you get stuck in a corner with someone who wants to give you the details of their dress, or what happened to them over the weekend, and you end up missing everybody.” She did meet Kristen Stewart (“not much of a talker”) and catch up with Karen Elson, who wore a McQueen dress from 2004 — the same one she’d worn in the show. Horyn says that the Costume Institute’s McQueen show is “the best exhibit that Andrew Bolton, the curator, has ever done. In the first place, you could tell that he was sensitive to Mr. McQueen’s work, and, in the second, he picked the clothes that mattered and then he told stories with them.” [On The Runway]
• Hilary Alexander: “I was going to have to start my story of New York’s Met Ball Gala, by saying that Lauren Hutton went home with my notebook (she borrowed it to write down Stella McCartney‘s telephone number). But the eternal beauty redeemed herself by having it delivered back to my hotel — like Cinderella — on the stroke of midnight.” And that is among the very many reasons why you should never give a source your notebook. [Telegraph]
• Meanwhile, Jacob Bernstein and Robin Givhan write, “Curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition’s design conjured the theatricality of a McQueen runway show, and the selection of clothes, mostly from the house’s archives, made his talent clear.” Hamish Bowles recalls that when he first met the designer, who was then still a student at Central St. Martins: “I was terrified of him. He was inarticulate, he was abrasive. There were very few teeth and a significant beer belly. He was not the paradigm of a fashion designer.” [TDB]
• If you want to watch Daphne Guinness‘s “performance” getting dressed for the Met ball in Barneys New York‘s front window, it’s here. [YouTube]
• On Sunday night, Vera Wang hosted a viewing party for L’Amour Fou, a pedestrian authorized documentary about Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. (This was the fateful little fête at which Derek Blasberg learned Osama bin Laden had been killed.) Wang said of Saint Laurent: “I moved to Paris when I didn’t make the figure-skating Olympic team in 1968. I skated one more year, and then I dropped out of college, Sarah Lawrence, and I moved to Paris with my French skating boyfriend. There are only two things to do in Paris — well, three — but I won’t mention them all, and one of ’em ain’t figure skating. They’re fashion and food. I fell in love with fashion when I was living in Paris, and I decided when I came back to New York to work in fashion, and part of the reason was the explosion of Yves Saint Laurent in 1969.” [The Cut]
• Hairstylist Edward Tricomi recalls of the designer: “I remember him teaching me how to tie bows. I would hold the hair out of the way for him when he was tying bows on some of the clothes. He was a very nice man. Then we would go to these dinners at night, and he used to call me Eddie — he was very funny — and he would give me pigeon. He would order pigeon and not tell me, and say, ‘It’s hamburger!’ He would say, ‘It’s hamburger, hamburger!’ I would say I know it’s pigeon, don’t lie. It was very funny, we had a little funny thing like that.” [Racked]
• Joe Zee‘s first attempts to get a job in fashion were not altogether successful. He told this story at a recent panel discussion: “As a recent college grad applying to be a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily, Zee was asked to stage a photo shoot as a test. The results were even more disastrous than any conundrum Bravo or MTV could cook up: first, the location flooded; then, a light fell, exploded, and caught on fire. And his model? A no-show. By the time Zee did damage control and found another model to fit the clothes, the location kicked them out, closing before they’d even shot a single frame.” [Fashionista]
• A Melbourne-born model named Anja Konstantinova is walking in Sydney’s fashion week, which is going on right now. And she is only 5’4″. [Isaac Likes]
• Black Borsalino fedora hats, as worn by utra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish: now popular with hipsters, allegedly. [NYTimes]