My wedding season solution? Spending £50 on a hired frock

Telegraph

26-04-2025

Hark, is that the sound of 100 or so people singing Jerusalem, floating from a Home Counties church? Quite possibly, because Lent's over and we're now well and truly into wedding season. How lovely. Celebrations, confetti, champagne and so on. But what are you going to wear?
Because as the wedding industry has boomed in the past decade or so, so has the peculiar idea that you can't wear the same outfit to more than one wedding if some of the same guests are going to be at both. Why? What will happen? Will the sky fall in?
It's partly the rise in fast fashion, partly social media's fault, because these days people want to post pictures of themselves looking glamorous online, and they want to be in different outfits every time. You can't post a picture of yourself in the same dress, goodness no. You wouldn't get as many likes. You need to look different in each picture and thus be in a new frock.
Sometimes this makes me feel quite warmly towards old novels in which the ravishing but impoverished heroine has only one good dress and must make it work for every ball she goes to. Quite often, she still bags the prince or duke, though, so let that be a lesson to you, as you panic trawl the Rixo website.
I'm obviously referring more to women here. Men, you can always change your pocket square or wear a nattier pair of socks for each wedding. Although, of course, you could also wear a frock if you so wish. Great Aunt Ermintrude might be quite startled, but the recent ruling about who exactly is a woman said nothing about that.
Unless you're the actual bride, I wonder whether that old adage 'nobody's looking at you, dear' could be applied to weddings these days? Of course, one wants to look their best, but now one must apparently buy a new dress, and new shoes, and a new bag, and new earrings, and have perfectly manicured nails in order to attend a wedding. And that's on top of having already spent £63 million on travel and hotels and matching spatulas from the wedding list.
That said, I panicked ahead of a recent wedding because I'm an enormous hypocrite as well as a mere mortal, and not immune to the pressures of wanting to look fancy in a home counties church either. 'I have simply nothing to wear!' I cried into my wardrobe, in the manner of Imelda Marcos surveying her shoe rack and declaring that she'd simply have to go barefoot.
I'd hire something, I decided, which I've done previously for weddings. Most memorably, for my friend Georgie's wedding at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, where I wore a silver, sequinned jumpsuit which was very jazzy and fun, but also shed sequins like a Labrador sheds hair. This meant I left a trail of silver sequins from the chapel, through the grand old buildings, to the room in which the reception was taking place, which may have been a surprise for any Chelsea Pensioners attending the Sunday service in the morning.
Still, there are several companies now which offer posh frocks for hire. A particularly good one in Notting Hill, Loan The Look, with a studio where you can go and try on various outfits beforehand to ensure something fits. But for this specific wedding, on another website, I found a gold sequinned jumpsuit (I seem to have a fetish for going to weddings dressed like Shirley Bassey). Fifty quid for four days, instead of buying it for £600. That's one of the benefits of hiring: you get to wear expensive togs you wouldn't necessarily buy and feel a million bucks.
Three days before said wedding, however, I received an apologetic email from the company, saying the jumpsuit had been returned to them in a substandard condition by its previous borrower, and they were refunding me. Help! I sent back a furious email asking if there was anything else I could hire. They instantly called me.
At the time, I was standing in a darkened gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, attending the press preview of the new Cartier exhibition. Surrounding me were glittering tiaras in glass cabinets, and chic women in bouclé suits and Cartier watches. I shrunk into one corner and hissed down the line: 'The wedding's in three days! I haven't got time to buy anything else!'
I'm not, as a rule, high maintenance. I spend my days in odd socks and old leggings. So old, in fact, that at a gym class last week, while on the floor, legs akimbo, the instructor discreetly bent down and told me I had a hole in my crotch. But that moment in the V&A felt quite high maintenance, and eventually the woman on the other end of the phone agreed they would send me a different gold jumpsuit and a floral dress. Two items in case one didn't fit. I hung up and continued wandering around the exhibition, reflecting forlornly that the Maharaja of Patiala, whose dazzling Cartier necklace strung with 2,930 diamonds has a prominent position in one cabinet, probably never had to deal with such problems.
They arrived a day later. And even for me, the jumpsuit was a bit like 2-for-1 cocktails. Too blingy, and potentially sweaty given the hot forecast. So, it was on with the floral number, which was off-the-shoulder and quite Amalfi coast for the Cotswolds in April, but probably better than looking like I was onstage for the late-night soul slot at 11pm. Also, it came in a nifty little zip-up box, with a sticky returns label, so all I had to do to send it back was slap the label on the same box afterwards and sling it into the post office. No washing or dry cleaning required.
I recently mentioned hiring to a friend who was in a flap about a wedding, and she said she'd be too nervous to try it. But, odd hiccup aside, it's easy, not expensive and eco. Alternatively, you really can wear something you already own, and the sky probably won't fall in (I'm talking to myself, as much as anyone else).