Princess Diana’s bridesmaid recalls being ‘alarmed’ at ‘frilly’ dress she wore for royal wedding

The designer says she had reservations about the dress as a ‘tomboy’

An official family photo taken on 29 July 1981, the wedding day of Prince Charles (C-R) and Lady Diana (C-L), the Princess of Wales (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

India Hicks has revealed that she was “alarmed” when she was asked to wear a “frilly dress” when she served as a bridesmaid to Princess Diana and Prince Charles at age 12.

Hicks, a second cousin and goddaughter to Charles and daughter to the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Pamela, told Insider that she was a “tomboy” when the wedding took place on 29 July 1981.

She described the bridesmaid dress as “voluptuous and over the top, and drama everywhere”, acknowledging that it was “a time and place and a moment in fashion in the 1980s”.

“So I understand that those dresses were so befitting to the era,” Hicks said, adding: “However, if you were a tomboy like me… when you are asked to be a bridesmaid, you are proud and delighted, but you are a little alarmed at being asked to wear a frilly dress, as you can imagine.”

The interior designer and writer reflected on how Diana and Charles’ wedding became a significant moment in royal history.

“I think at the time, everybody thought it was this fairytale – nobody understood what was to come,” she said.

Hicks added that she was “hugely proud” to have been a part of the wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral, but once it was over, her mother told her: “Right, that is that, and now it’s back to your normal life.”

Last September, Hicks married her long-time partner of 26 years, David Flint Wood, at St Bartholomew’s parish church in Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire.

Model/decorator India Hicks and David Flint Wood sign copies of their new coffee table book "Island Life" on March 26, 2004 (Getty Images)

She spoke about her relationship and the wedding to BRIDES in January, describing how she first knew Wood as a friend of her older sister’s before they “shared a rather romantic evening at a charity event in the Bahamas”.

They parted ways but reconnected again several years later in New York, where Wood was running a small hotel on nearby Harbour Island. She fell pregnant a few months later, after which Wood proposed but Hicks said no.

“In my mind, I was saying, ‘I’m a strong independent woman! I don’t need to get married!’ Which is what I said for 26 years, until suddenly I didn’t,” she said.

Hicks will host an online conversation with her mother on Friday 4 February to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and has said that part of the proceeds from tickets sold for the event will be donated to the Prince’s Trust.

She wrote on her Instagram this week: “Join my mother and me on Friday as we talk about that famous day when she was with the Queen in Kenya, and what happened next.”