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Once upon a time, one of the Beatles walked onto the set of A Hard Day’s Night, met a girl, asked her out, got rejected, asked again, and the rest—the passion, the music, and a love triangle of Shakespearean proportions—is history.
Nearly everything about George Harrison and Pattie Boyd’s relationship was the stuff of rock ’n’ roll dreams—aside, of course, from its famously rocky end, which saw Boyd leave Harrison for his best friend, Eric Clapton. More than half a century later, their stylish take on urban wedding dressing remains iconic. According to Boyd, their ceremony—which occurred on this exact date in 1966—took place in the morning at the Epsom register office in Surrey, England, and both she and Harrison were dressed to the nines by swinging ’60s fashion designer Mary Quant.
“I bought a Mary Quant pinky-red shot-silk dress, which came to just above the knee, and I wore it with creamy stockings and pointy red shoes,” she writes in her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight. “On top, because it was January and cold, I wore a red fox-fur coat, also by Mary Quant, that George gave me. She made George a beautiful black Mongolian lamb coat.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t just Boyd’s classic crimson look that was memorable—her decidedly ’60s bridal beauty look during a press reception the day after was, too. The shampoo girl-turned-model, who was photographed by the likes of David Bailey and Terence Donovan, and featured on the cover of numerous issues of Vogue, wore the decade’s telltale Brit girl blowout, with her champagne blonde lengths flipped at the ends. Offsetting her lash-grazing, side-swept asymmetrical bangs, she wore an impossibly chic, side-leaning knit burgundy beret. And while the Gallic chapeau was itself a statement, it also showcased her dramatic cut-crease gaze, with kittenish flicks of black eyeliner and lids swathed in pastel blue pigment. Doubling down on the glamour, Boyd’s look was the perfect counterpart to Harrison, whose unkempt dark shag and feral brows are back in the spotlight thanks to Peter Jackson’s three-part The Beatles: Get Back documentary.
Boyd’s romantic allure—immortalized forever in the Harrison-penned Beatles ballad “Something,” which Frank Sinatra deemed “the greatest love song of the 21st century”—and supernatural beauty are hard to live up to, but her wedding day look serves as a visual manifesto for how to deftly execute beauty for a city hall civil ceremony: Get a directional blowout, throw on a beret, and leave yourself an hour (or two!) to draw on scene-stealing cat-eyes.
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