Kate Middleton's wedding dress

 Kate Middleton and Prince William attend the wedding of Harry Meade and Rosemarie Bradford – it's a safe bet that she won't be in this colour combination on Friday. Photograph: Tim Rooke/Rex Features

After months of secrecy and speculation surrounding the royal wedding dress, the Guardian can today exclusively reveal that Kate Middleton will be wearing a vintage-inspired, bias-cut ivory Libélula gown designed by Sophie Cranston when she marries Prince William on Friday.

Or at least that's the consensus among the more than 3,000 people who have taken part in our wedding dress crowdsourcing exercise. At the time of writing, some 33% plumped for Cranston, followed by Alice Temperley (20%), then Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen and Bruce Oldfield (17% each).


This tallies with the Huffington Post's "exclusive revelation" last week that Cranston is the chosen designer (and Middleton did wear a Libélula coat to a friend's wedding in January). Meanwhile the Daily Mail has told us both that three gowns have been ordered and that Kate has actually designed the dress herself. Obviously none of you really know, but the wisdom of the crowd can sometimes be an accurate indicator (we did pretty well on the Apple iPad ahead of its launch early last year).
A clear majority of you (57%) think the dress will be ivory, with only 20% thinking Catherine will plump for white (it turns out, incidentally, that the equation of white with virginity is a recent notion – before Queen Victoria popularised the white wedding dress brides wore any colour, and blue denoted purity).
Plus, 67% of you think she'll go for sleeves rather than something strappy or a bandeau style, with the pro-sleeve brigade fairly evenly divided between short and long sleeves. As for headgear, a veil is favoured by a hefty 74%; the choice of tiara is more tricky – joint favourites (at 34% each) are the Queen Mother's Strathmore Rose tiara and the Cambridge Lovers Knot (given by the Queen to Princess Diana as a wedding gift and returned after the divorce), with the George III fringe tiara trailing behind at 22%.

Source: Guardian