You can just about get a glimpse of the dress in this photo taken during a walkabout in Cambridge, New Zealand, 12 April 2014.
And a much clearer view here, holding Prince George on one of his official birthday photos, at the Sensational Butterflies exhibition at London's Natural History Museum.
As I was saying, Catherine's original dress was quickly identified as the "Budding Heart Silk Tea Dress" by British label Suzannah. Suzannah is a brand that creates "flattering, beautiful investment pieces" with a modern edge, but still infused with plenty of vintage charm, as is very much the case for the Budding Heart dress, which is based on a 1930s design.
Suzannah.
From the Suzannah website product description: the dress is made of "matt silk crepe de chine with skirt part lined in 100% silk habotai", and remains available in UK sizes 8-16 for £475 (about $770).
I loved this dress, and thought it'd be a perfect choice for summer, as it could be easily dressed up or down, so I was thrilled when numerous fashion blogs came up with repli-kate suggestions.
I ordered the "Green Floral Heart Print Tea Silk Vintage Style Dress" from eBay. It was a bargain at £29.99 (about $50), plus £5.50 standard international postage (about $9). I have to say first of all that I wasn't exactly impressed with shipping times: I ordered the dress on 17 August and it only shipped on 26 August. Afterwards, it took about a month for it to get to me in Italy with registered postage, and I received it on 29 September. The original listing stated the dress was going to be shipped from the UK, so I assumed it wouldn't take long for it to arrive. When I contacted the seller about it, I was told (as I had imagined...) that the dress was in fact shipping from China, hence the delay. The listing has now been amended to reflect this. Anyway, apart from this initial glitches, I was on the whole happy with my shopping experience: the seller always replied promptly and helpfully to my emails and when the dress arrived I was not disappointed.
Listed as being 80% viscose and 20% silk, the dress is, thankfully, much less shiny in person than it looked in the listing photos. The fabric is good quality, and tolerated a medium-hot iron, although I doubt very much the silk content is as high as 20%.
eBay repli-kate.
The cut looks a lot like the original Suzannah dress, down to the skirt part being lined in a white fabric, and the print is almost identical. The main difference I noticed is, in the eBay copy the white hearts have a black/dark grey contour (as shown below) which is absent in the original print:
eBay repli-kate.
I'm usually a UK size 12, I got the size 14, as I was worried it'd run small, and it fits me perfectly. The dress is available in UK sizes 8-18. I found the measurements supplied were fairly accurate; plus, at 101 cm long, the dress is the perfect lenght for me (I'm 168 cm tall).
The lowdown: you can definitely tell this is mass-produced and not the original, £475 dress, but for the money I paid I think it's a great repli-kate and I'm looking forward to wearing it in this first mild day of autumn!
Has anyone else purchased this or another repli-kate of the Suzannah dress? Let me know what you think!
