Christopher Kane walks us through the process—which began just two and a half weeks before the wedding.
The Story Behind Lena Dunham’s 3 Wedding Gowns
Lena Dunham asked Christopher Kane a question—kind of out of the blue—a few months back over text. “She said, ‘By the way, I’m getting married, and I’d love for you to do the dress.’ I was like, that came out of nowhere, but yeah, absolutely,” Kane says over Zoom two days after Dunham married musician Luis Felber in an intimate ceremony at the Union Club in London’s Soho neighborhood. “I had no idea she was seeing someone.” They didn’t have much time; their first fitting was two and a half weeks before the wedding. But they had a shared vision.
“Do you know what? We sort of came up with the same idea,” says Kane. “I knew she loved the ’60s, and she was looking at brides like Sharon Tate, June Carter Cash, and Priscilla Presley. There’s also something about the Holy Communion world, even though she’s Jewish. For me, growing up in Scotland, it was a big deal. Your Holy Communion and the perfect little dress. It was so weird that children were dressed up in these bridal outfits. We liked that subversive world. That’s what Lena loves too.”
The dress Dunham wore for the ceremony, the first of three, is laced with this subversive backstory. If you didn’t know it, though, you’d just see the bride. “When she first walked out into the room where it was, people were really in awe. They really stood back and were crying,” says the British designer, who struck up a friendship with Dunham after dressing her for the Met gala in 2019; she and Jemima Kirke attended the “Camp”-themed event with Kane, decked out in minidresses that read Rubberist and Looner, respectively, with latex gloves.
When Kane met Dunham for her first fitting at her home, he had created multiple toiles of dresses for her to try on. He assumed they would need options. “When you do brides, they think they know what they want, but then they go the opposite way,” says Kane. “So you have to have all these options ready. Lena knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t changing her mind. She tried it on and that was it. That was the one.” The dress was modeled after look 54 from his fall 2019 runway show, with lace bishop sleeves and Kane’s signature cupcake skirt (which dramatically puffs out thanks to layers of organza and crinoline). Paired with white tights, white shoes, and a floor-length veil affixed with a tiny bow, Dunham’s look was, as Kane says, “almost doll-like.” Her grandmother’s watch was sewn into the organza of the skirt: something blue. She wore her mother’s Art Deco earrings and a pendant made from one of her grandmother’s earrings as a necklace.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Sarah Spellings
