When Lauren Vyse tried on Vivienne Westwood ’s Galaxy cape dress at the brand’s London boutique, she instantly knew it was what she wanted to wear for her Hackney Town Hall wedding in August. “It was the first shop that I went to, and it was the only dress I really wanted to try on,” the PR executive recalls. “Then when I put it on, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s definitely the one.’”

The only snag? The dress was out of her budget. Vyse kept looking, but she found that nothing else quite compared. “I was going into shops and trying on very similar dresses, but trying to make them look like [the Vivienne Westwood] one,” she recalls. In the meantime, the lead times for the made-to-order gowns she was looking at put her under pressure to make a decision. “The last shop I went into, they were like

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