The groom sewed her wedding dress, and the marriage lasted nine years: what survived from 1959

On 10 May 1959, at St Mary's Church in Weybridge, Surrey, Julie Andrews married in a dress sewn by the groom. Not as a gesture, nor as a wedding-day joke - Tony Walton was a set and costume designer by profession, and this was his work.

They met as children. She was eleven, he was twelve, at a theatre performance. They wrote to each other through their teenage years, drifted apart, and found each other again as adults. The engagement happened at a family dinner, without a scene. Andrews later wrote in her memoirs: "We looked at each other and smiled, and honestly I don't know how it happened, but one of us whispered to the other: we should get married soon."

The dress he created followed not a single trend of 1959. Made from layers of organza, with an asymmetric ankle-length hem, a swan neckline, long sleeves with buttons, a fitted corset and a full skirt with a train. The whole thing was hand-embroidered with flowers - roses and lilies - densest on the sleeves and along the hem. That is an amount of handwork measured today in months, not weeks.

The veil was a Juliet cap, a shape borrowed from the twenties, which had in turn borrowed it from the Middle Ages, fastened with two raised flowers on each side and the same embroidery as the dress. The engagement ring was Cartier, designed as a laurel-wreath crown, accompanied by a brooch from the same house - both gifts from Walton. The bouquet was small: a cascade of orchids, roses, buds, carnations and lily of the valley. The shoes were plain white courts. The hair - a natural short bob with a side parting.

Around 300 guests attended, among them the actress Maggie Smith, despite the couple wanting something discreet. The press came anyway. Hours after the ceremony they were already on their way to America and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel.

At that point she already had the lead in My Fair Lady on Broadway, but Mary Poppins had not yet been filmed. When that film's turn came in 1964, the costumes and sets were done by - the same man. Their daughter Emma was born in 1962. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968 under the pressure of fame and parenthood, but they remained close friends to the end.

What survived all of that is not the marriage, it is the dress. Sixty-seven years on, brides looking for a romantic cut with hand embroidery, a fitted waist and floral motifs are looking at photographs from that wedding without knowing whose it is. And the point is the same today: the best wedding outfit is the one made by someone who knows you, not the one chosen by someone who is selling to you.