The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 was one of the most memorable in modern royal history. While more than 750 million viewers around the world watched the ceremony on their television sets, a further 600,000 people lined the procession route through the streets of London, hoping to catch a glimpse of the royal couple as they made their way through the city, heading to St Paul’s Cathedral. There, a congregation of 2,700 people—including dignitaries and heads of state from all around the world—watched the heir to the British throne marry a young woman destined, at that time, to be Britain’s next queen.
One of the most memorable aspects of Charles and Diana’s big day was Diana’s wedding dress. Designed in absolute secrecy by legendary English fashion designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel, Diana wore an ivory-colored gown of silk-taffeta, hand-woven antique lace and crinoline, embellished with 10,000 individually sewn pearls and dramatic puffed sleeves, and followed by a 25-foot train that could barely fit inside the royal carriage. (Royal bridesmaid India Hicks, a member of the legendary Mountbatten dynasty, later recalled “trying as best as I could to de-wrinkle the situation” as Diana stepped down from the carriage to enter the cathedral.) The elaborate design, which went on to be credited with establishing a trend for over-the-top wedding gowns in the 1980s, also featured what is claimed to be the longest veil in the history of royal weddings: extending far beyond the dress’ already immense train, the veil comprised a single 153-yard length of fine quality tulle. Diana’s bridesmaids, again, had a mammoth task ensuring it looked perfect and had rehearsed for the big day by practicing folding an enormous cotton sheet.
Lady Diana’s veil might have been longer than the length of a football pitch, but incredibly it is not the largest veil in the record books. According to the Guinness Book of Records, that particular title belongs to Cypriot bride Maria Paraskeva, whose veil on her wedding day in August 2018 was almost 50 times longer than that of Lady Diana’s. In fact, in total, it was more than four miles in length.
Determined to ensure that her wedding day ended up a record-breaking event, Paraskeva spent a year sourcing factories, fabric-makers, tailors, and local seamstresses who could make her fairytale idea a reality. Eventually, she found a company in Greece who was willing to manufacture eight immense 1,000m rolls of high-quality tulle fabric—over three months— which Paraskeva then had sewn together by a team of local tailors in Cyprus to create one single seemingly never-ending veil. The entire manufacturing process alone cost her around 4,000 euros (equivalent to $4,600).
Once the manufacturers and seamstresses’ work was complete, the veil was taken via pickup truck to a local school field in the town of Larnaca, Cyprus, where it was slowly unrolled and pinned down to the ground by a team of 30 volunteers so that its entire length could be measured. A local civil engineer and quantity surveyor were called on to ensure that the measurements were accurate, and together they reckoned the entire veil measured an incredible 22,843 feet, 2.11 inches—equivalent to more than 60 football fields, or 76 times the height of the Statue of Liberty! Paraskeva’s place in the record books was very easily assured.