In the romantic comedy, “Marry Me,” Jennifer Lopez’s Kat Valdez is set to marry her boyfriend Basion live on stage in one heck of a wedding dress. The dress is just one of 45 looks that costume designer Caroline Duncan created for the movie.
The Cinderella-like wedding dress was a rose-gold metallic asymmetrical dress that weighed nearly 100 pounds. The showstopper is highlighted in the movie’s opening scene in which Lopez’s character Kat Valez wears to wed Maluma‘s Bastian on stage during a concert.
Duncan collaborated with Jennifer’s stylists to find a runway piece that was built for a show minutes before that designer, Zuhair Murad, loaned it to the film. “One of the many things that I love about the dress is that it’s not white,” Duncan says. “It’s a rose-gold with a lot of metallic in there. It ties into Kat’s [superstar] look in terms of pop-star shimmer, and the volume of it is so satisfying on that stage.”
The designer wanted to get away from the traditional white dress and went for the biggest dress she could find. “The dress takes over the wedding,” Duncan tells Pop Sugar. The veil is massive…around 20 feet long.” Duncan says, “and the dress has eight layers of horsehair, five other layers of tulle, and has a 25-foot train. It weighs about 95 pounds and takes five people to carry it. Who other than the most famous pop star in the world could pull off that dress?”
Director Kat Coiro also wanted to highlight how out-of-scale that same dress looks backstage when the character leaves the venue. Once in her getaway car, the dress shrinks her and her new husband Charlie (Owen Wilson.) It’s a symbol of how that wedding had gotten too big, and it wasn’t honest and has taken over her ability to see who she was marrying,” said Coiro.
That dress was more high maintenance than any of the actors expected. “After each take, it required about five minutes to reset Jennifer in the car for the next take,” Coiro says, laughing. “There was just so much material.”
“Marry Me” is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.
