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where there isn’t a great deal around,’ explains McCall. ‘Either it hasn’t lasted – chiffon with beading tends to fall to pieces under its own weight over time – or the dresses were re-structured at a later date because the materials were so fine and expensive. Also, there is the problem that the clothes have to look new to the people who are wearing them. They’ve got to look fabulous.’
    The dress that everyone will be waiting with bated breath to see is the wedding dress. McCall explains the complex issues behind it: ‘From our research, I knew that satin and lace were the key things in wedding dresses at the time. We settled on an evening dress shape that I liked, a tabard, one that could be dressed up with a train. I always had this idea of a metallic lace effect – I wanted her to shimmer, unlike anything we had seen before.’ Swarovski supplied the stones and they were all hand-stitched onto the dress. The wedding tiara came from Bentley & Skinner, the jewellers on Piccadilly, lending the production a piece that came from 1830. Arriving on its original frame, it would have been worn high up on top of the head, but McCall was able to alter the frame so that it could be worn lower down on the head, as was the fashion in 1920. Valued at £ 125,000 , a designated person had to be hired to look after it at all times on set.

    Hairstyles, too, reflected this novel sensation of liberty in dress. Hair had been getting shorter, a trend that partly began when women working in factories and farms had had to cut their long hair for practicality. But again, Chanel led the way. She cut off her own hair because, she said, ‘it annoyed me’. Her stylish ‘bob’ became a fashion template, but other popular styles were the ‘shingle’ (when the hair is gradually cut shorter to a ‘v’ in the nape of the neck) and the ‘Eton crop’ (a very slicked-down short haircut, much like a schoolboy’s).
    Make-up began to make more of an appearance in this bold new decade, although as one grande dame recalled, ‘It was considered frightfully
mal vu
.’ When the American Lady Bingham appeared at a lunch wearing a hat full of artificial cherries and lipstick to match, there was much tutting of disapproval; ‘Why didn’t she have a discreet colour, instead of cherry red?’ Nevertheless, skilfully applied pale powder and lipstick was acceptable on women other than actresses or prostitutes, which was quite a development in itself.
    Permanent waving was ‘a fairly new process and was as painful as going to the dentist’. The pain that must be endured to create temporary hairstyles was almost as bad – the Marcel-wave curling tongs would become almost unbearably hot, often burning the hair, but the temperature could not be successfully regulated because if they were used when too cool the curls would not ‘set’.
    Mary travels down to London rather more than her sisters and stays with her aunt, Lady Rosamund Painswick, if not in her father’s house in St James’s Square. These trips are in part what makes her more comfortable in the world of fashion, and certainly London is where she likes to shop. But there were other entertainments there, too. The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1920 had four portraits of fashionable young women as a highlight, reported the
Illustrated London News
. Mary might have gone to see if any of her friends were featured. Going to art exhibitions was seen as a suitable activity for debutantes, particularly when they could see charming fantasies such as the one by the fashionable portraitist Charles Sims:
The Fairies Ran Away With Their Clothes
. But the picture of the year was Sargent’s ‘haunting and horrible
Gassed
, files of blinded soldiers groping their way across a battlefield’. The war and all its horror was never far away in the minds of those living then, having a sobering effect on any thoughts of gaiety.
    The surviving heroes were fêted. T. E. Lawrence (known