Bella’s “Nightmare” Wedding Dress Explained by Breaking Dawn Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson

MTV Style talked to Breaking Dawn costume designer Michael Wilkinson.  Michael talked about the wedding attire, Bella’s nightmare dress, dressing the wolves and Edward in shorts!  LOL!

The most critical element with this movie is, of course, the wedding (*spoiler alert* though, ed note: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT TWICE ALREADY?), and this was misleading in the previews but there’s a dream sequence wedding and a real wedding. How did you delineate the two dresses from each other?
The script gave us a great opportunity to get inside Bella’s thoughts about the impending wedding. There’s a nightmare wedding and her perfect wedding. For the nightmare, we chose something that was a version of the dress that she would hate to wear. Something that’s uncomfortable and a dress Bella would be embarrassed in. It was stiff and had a boned bodice that showed a lot of bare skin which she’d be horrified by because she’s a bit of a tomboy.

There’s nothing very girly about her style so we had a huge, cumbersome, puffy skirt. We just tried to picture everything she’d find difficult to deal with and import that into a dress.

The real dress fit Bella like a second skin and I was really glad about how all that worked out. It reflects her simplicity and elegance. It’s not too girly, I thought it really hit the right note of having some vintage elements while working well for a modern woman.

That dress was stunning. I went to the midnight screening and it was an entire theater filled to the gills with girls sighing in unison. The lace panel in the back with hundreds of covered buttons, we all swooned.
That’s the great thing about Kristen, she has such an amazing physique so we thought the best thing to do was to show that. The dress really reveals curves and highlights each part of her shape but it’s all covered up and so we thought it was sexy but completely elegant.

There was such speculation for a long time about who would design that dress but it was Carolina Herrera all along, right?
Carolina had worked with Stephenie personally for events. And they’d struck up a friendship and dialogue so we talked to Carolina for the dress.

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