Princess Eugenie wedding dress: Peter Pilotto and Christopher de Vos design gown showing bride's scoliosis scars

London-based design duo Christopher de Vos and Peter Pilotto have secured one of the biggest bridal commissions of the year, creating the wedding dress of Princess Eugenie of York.

As has become a custom at British royal weddings, the label that the bride had chosen was only revealed as she arrived at St George’s Chapel to marry Jack Brooksbank and, just as at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, when Givenchy’s Clare Waight Keller scooped the top job, the choice was a complete surprise.

Austrian-Italian designer Pilotto and his business partner de Vos are famed for their vivid digital print designs, and neither has ever produced a wedding dress before, meaning that their names were never even mooted for the commission.

They have presented bi-annual collections at London Fashion Week since they founded their brand in 2007, yet keep a relatively low profile compared to many other names who were considered front runners, like Erdem Moralıoğlu or Roland Mouret, who frequently dress the royals for public events. Eugenie has quietly worn pieces from the label on several occasions in the past, after meeting the pair at an event for the Artemis Council for Women Artists.

Full-skirted and off-the-shoulder, with a folding portrait neckline, the silk and cotton jacquard gown they have created for Princess Eugenie is designed with motifs that are important to the couple. There's a thistle for Scotland, symbolising their fondness for Balmoral, a shamrock for Ireland in a nod to the Ferguson family, the York Rose in honour of the bride's father and ivy to represent the couple's home, Ivy Cottage, all wrapped up in a rope design which takes a sateen look because of the jacquard weave.

De Vos and Pilotto worked closely with the bride to collaborate on the dress from their East London studio, looking back at archive pictures of royal brides for inspiration. 

The bride accessorised with shoes by British label Charlotte Olympia, founded by Charlotte Dellal, and wore the Greville Emerald Kokoshnik tiara, which belonged to the late Queen Mother. She also, notably, chose not to wear a veil.  

The slight V shaping of the dress neckline served to show a scar on the bride’s back, which Eugenie had previously explained that she wanted to be on display. The princess had hinted in a television interview that her dress would not hide the scoliosis scars on her back, obtained from surgery she had to straighten her spine when she was 12 years-old.

Representatives from the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust, which treated her as a child, were in attendance at the wedding.

"I'm patron of their appeal and I had an operation when I was 12 on my back, and you'll see on Friday, but it's a lovely way to honour the people who looked after me and a way of standing up for young people who also go through this,” she told This Morning’s Eamonn Holmes.

"I think you can change the way beauty is, and you can show people your scars and I think it's really special to stand up for that. So that's one really important one.”

In an interview with British Vogue, published last month, Eugenie confirmed only that the designer of her dress would be from the UK. "I'm not telling anyone who is making it, but I can say it is a British-based designer."

In her Vogue interview, Eugenie had also spoken of the importance of showing young women that modern ‘fairytale weddings’ don’t need to be Photoshopped or filtered on Instagram. 

"Nowadays, it's so easy to recoil when you see a perfect image on Instagram – but it's important that it's real,” she said. “We're real."

Yesterday, bookies had suspended odds on favourite Stella McCartney, following a surge of bets placed on the designer. It was assumed that, as Eugenie and her fiance Jack Brooksbank had decided to have a ‘plastic-free’ wedding, McCartney’s eco-credentials might have appealed. 

Before Paddy Power closed its offering, the odds on McCartney were 1/2, while fellow British designer Erdem Moralıoğlu was at 2/1, Vivienne Westwood was at 5/1, Alexander McQueen was at 6/1 and Burberry was at 8/1.