Pared back but still full of romance, welcome to a new era of weddings – and wedding dresses 7 February 2021 • 6:00am Say yes to the dress: Erdem's new bridal collection Even before the events of the past year, the idea that weddings and bridal dresses were a case of ‘the bigger, the better’ was starting to wane. Throw in a pandemic, and just about the chicest way to get married now (if and when lockdowns permit) is to dial things back and go for small and special. Just look at Princess Beatrice, who reportedly abandoned her original wedding gown in favour of a Norman Hartnell creation borrowed from her granny’s royal archive when she married Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in Windsor last summer. Then there’s the supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who looked elegant in a pared-back tea dress made by her friend Ulyana Sergeenko when she wed Antoine Arnault, son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man, in an intimate civil ceremony (instead of the abbey affair they had planned) in Paris.