What will Wills wear?

With the days counting down until the Royal wedding on 29 April, there has – understandably – been a great deal of speculation as to what the bride will wear. The Sybarite hears that the smart money is on white… There has also been a flurry of excitement over the past two days as to whether the Prime Minister will wear morning dress, and, happily, it now seems that he will do the decent thing and don his tails. But in all of this hullaballoo there has been little attention paid to one of the most interesting aspects of the ceremony – what will the groom wear?

One of the more satisfying aspects of being a senior royal, I would imagine, is that you have an extensive dressing-up box with which to play. Accordingly, there are many outfits which HRH could choose for his wedding day. I think we can rule out plain morning dress; although his father chose it for his second wedding, that was a (relatively) low-key affair. The Earl of Wessex also wore morning dress for his marriage to the then-Sophie Rhys Jones. Although Prince Edward holds several honorary military appointments – he is, for example, Colonel of the 2^nd Battalion, The Rifles, and Colonel-in-Chief of the Saskatchewan Dragoons – it may well have been thought that any references, however slight, to his own time in the military were best omitted.

One obvious choice for Prince William would be his uniform as Colonel of the Irish Guards. It is an appointment which he has only held since February, but the Foot Guards will be much in evidence on the day of the wedding itself, and I daresay His Royal Highness would look very dashing in scarlet, though the bearskin might be deemed to be something of an encumbrance. Moreover, as Colonel of a Guards regiment, he is in the company of his grandfather (Grenadiers), his father (Welsh Guards), his aunt (Blues and Royals) and his first cousin twice removed (Scots Guards).

However, the Royal family also has long-standing and very close connections with the Royal Navy, the senior service. The Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York have all served in the Navy, and Prince William trained with the RN for a time. He is Commodore-in-Chief of the Royal Navy Submarine Service, and of HM Naval Base Clyde, and would follow his grandfather and father in walking up the aisle in dark blue.

However, it seems likely that he will appear on Friday week in his service dress as a Flight Lieutenant of the Royal Air Force. That he has invited all of his comrades from C Flight, 22 Squadron, to the wedding indicates that his current position means a great deal to him, and he has appeared at public functions in RAF uniform before. It is a shame that RAF full dress is no longer worn (except by bandsmen), and that Prince William therefore will have to make do with tarted-up service dress (white gloves, dress belt, sword); a shame in particular as his great-grandfather, George VI, was married in RAF full dress.

A light-hearted little item in the Sunday Times Style section recently described Prince William as “accessorising” his RAF uniform with “a peacock-blue sash”. Hardly. It is his insignia as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter. But on a purely superficial level it is true that the Garter riband, in kingfisher blue, does not sit especially well with the blue-grey of RAF uniforms, and is much more striking against the scarlet of the Army or the dark blue of the Royal Navy.

Nevertheless, one should not be churlish. If he has, perhaps, more stylish uniforms available to him, Prince William should be saluted for wearing the dress of his working life to his wedding, assuming my hunch is right. The other branches of the military will be well represented, not least by the Royal family themselves, so maybe the focus on the blue-grey is not such a bad thing after all.