About Celine's wedding dresses

[Alexa]

Note: Ronny, same thing!

 

Mar. 26, 2006. 01:00 AM

HILARY CUNNINGHAM

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

 

 

"Whether ... we wish to fit in or dress `against the grain' or whether we simply don't give a hoot about clothes, dressing is something we can seldom avoid."

 

— Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell in Not Just Any Dress (2004)

 

Almost as soon as it's in hand, a wedding dress becomes an important artifact, soon to be dry-cleaned and preserved for the next generation. The bride in her dress is immortalized in wedding albums, her photograph to be scrutinized by kinfolk and descendants for decades to come.

 

For some observers, looking back with what might be called "pre-fabric-ated" hindsight, buried in the dress are clues to what would go right in the marriage and what would go wrong. (Some even claim that a wedding dress can portend the successes and failures of the woman in question.)

 

Celine Dion has had troubles with the wedding dress, not quite striking the right nuptial note the first time, and then having to return for a vigorous second attempt in a renewal of vows. As a pop diva Dion clearly faced unique difficulties around this event dress, being of course compelled to outdo her previous successes at fashion spectacle. (It seems that scaling down and going modest, though novel, was not an option.)

 

For her 1994 Montreal wedding, Dion donned a lavish wedding gown with a 20-foot train (Princess Diana's was 25) and a tiara composed of 2,000 Austrian crystals. (Images of Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy stumbling down a staircase in a mega-sized, Carmen Miranda-defying headpiece come to mind. Celine, needless to say, was far more graceful in her march to the altar.)

 

The problem with this outfit, however, was that its dress gestalt was undercut by the stream of statistics that accompanied it: The tiara weighed seven pounds, the 90 yards of Italian silk and French lace cost upwards of $25,000, the dress took 1,000 hours to finish, and so on. If this outfit inspired awe, it also made one want to go home and balance the chequebook.

 

Hence the need for a return appearance. The renewing-of-vows dress, worn just six years after the wedding and this time in Las Vegas, was a gold Givenchy gown. Was this second event dress a success? Only an understatement could fail in Las Vegas. Dion's dress was but one of a host of absurdly lavish elements in the ceremony: Berber tents, exotic Moroccan and Middle Eastern dishes, each room designed as a scene from The Thousand and One Nights, all in celebration of the groom's Lebanese and Syrian roots.