By Alison McGill
In modern times, we’ve seen a shift away from brides choosing the big white wedding dress. Sleekness has been a hallmark of bridal style for the past several decades, a trend we can directly attribute to Carolyn Bessette. She ushered in a new era of bridal style in 1996 when she married John F Kennedy Jr. in that famous silk slip-style wedding dress designed by Narciso Rodriguez (read our THE STORY OF…that famous dress here).
Over the years, there has been a slight shift back towards more elaborate, and voluminous ball gown wedding styles thanks to celebrity brides including Victoria Beckham, Gwen Stefani, Paris Hilton, Issa Rae, and Venus Williams. Watch for bridal ball gowns to once again be a top bridal style trend thanks to one of this year’s biggest pop culture moments to date: Emerald Fennell’s daring (or polarizing, depending on who you ask!) adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights.
The aesthetic of this darkly romantic film is in a class of its own, and quite frankly is chef’s kiss. The colour palette is bold and audacious with the main character of Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) only wearing black, white and red. Cathy wears more than a few big white dresses in the movie, but the most iconic one is her wedding dress.
The design of the dress Cathy wears to marry Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) feels like a merge of centuries of bridal style, which is what makes this gown such an iconic, and theatrically perfect, moment. Cathy’s off-the-shoulder wedding dress features a corset bodice, Basque waistline, embellished puffy drop sleeves, and a massive ball skirt made from a luxe, shimmering silver-tinged fabric. This dress is giving Victorian-era meets Lady Diana Spencer. The influence of the late Princess of Wales’ wedding style really comes through via the miles-long, gauzy tulle cathedral length veil that envelops Cathy, and blows riotously in the winds of England’s broody North York Moors, the setting for Wuthering Heights.
British costume designer Jacqueline Durran, a three-time BAFTA and two-time Oscar winner, is the creative genius behind the film’s costumes. A legend in the world of cinematic costuming (she designed the infamous green dress worn by Keira Knightly wore in the 2007 film Atonement), Duran shared in a recent interview with British Vogue she and her team made between 45 and 50 costumes just for the character of Cathy. Durran said she and director Fennell created Wuthering Heights wardrobe mood boards which featured everything from vintage Thierry Mugler and Alexander McQueen to specific historical period dressing suggestions as inspiration.
“Our references ranged from Elizabethan through to Georgian and Victorian, and from paintings and historical dress to contemporary fashion and representations of period costume in 20th-century films,” Durran explained in the Vogue interview. “The challenge was to distill that into looks that told the story that Emerald wanted to tell.”
As for Durann’s creative vision behind the bridal gown? “The wedding dress was an amalgam of Victorian and 1950s fashion.” She shares the final design was inspired by a few very specific things including the 19th century portraits by German portrait artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter (legendary for his romantic paintings of royalty and upper-class society), and the creations of English American designer Charles James who was renowned for his ball gowns and architectural silhouettes and details.
With a love for all things nostalgic topping the list of 2026 bridal vibes, expect Catherine Earnshaw’s cinematic Wuthering Heights wedding style to be emulated by brides-to-be for years to come.
