Some couples spend a year planning one wedding. Dua Lipa had two in the space of a week, and they could not have looked more different. The first was so small you could have missed it: a Sunday-morning signing at a London register office, a handful of people, no white gown. The second turned a centuries-old Sicilian estate into something out of a storybook, with a Chanel dress that took more than a thousand hours to embroider.
The legal wedding came first. On Sunday, May 31, 2026, Dua Lipa and the actor Callum Turner married at Old Marylebone Town Hall in London. Rolling Stone and TMZ reported it was a deliberately tiny affair, only around eight of their closest family and friends in the room. No red carpet, no hundred-strong guest list. Just the two of them and the people who matter most.
And Dua, forever the fashion obsessive, threw out the rulebook on the white dress. According to Hello, she wore a custom Schiaparelli Haute Couture look instead: an ivory blazer with personalized gold buttons over a blush bustier trimmed in white lace, a wide-brimmed hat, a serpent necklace and a small bouquet in hand. Turner kept it classic in a navy suit and tie. Elegant, understated, and about as far from a meringue ballgown as a bride can get.
If you know Callum Turner, it’s probably from the screen. The British-American actor has turned up in Fantastic Beasts, The Boys in the Boat and the Apple war drama Masters of Air. It was around that last project, in early 2024, that he and Dua were first linked, spotted together at a Masters of Air afterparty. They went public that summer, and by June 2025 they were engaged, a detail Dua confirmed in an interview with British Vogue.
She didn’t hide how she felt about it. “It’s very exciting,” she told Vogue of the ring. “I’m obsessed with it. It’s so me. It’s nice to know the person that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with knows you very well.” For a woman who has sung about heartbreak for the better part of a decade, it was a rare, unguarded moment of pure contentment.
The quiet part done, the celebration was anything but. A few days after the London signing, the couple and their guests decamped to Sicily. Reports placed the party at Villa Valguarnera, an 18th-century estate near Palermo so grand it’s sometimes called a miniature Versailles. Outlets described days of festivities, fireworks over the gardens, a dinner by Michelin-starred chef Tony Lo Coco, and, at one point, Elton John himself at the piano. The guest list reportedly included Charli XCX, Joe Alwyn and Grace Gummer.
And this is where the dress everyone had been waiting for finally appeared. When the Sicily photos emerged weeks later, fashion writers lost their minds, and the numbers explain why. Dua’s gown was a custom Chanel Haute Couture piece by the house’s new creative director, Matthieu Blazy, making her his first-ever Chanel bride. Marie Claire, WWD and Harper’s Bazaar reported the halter-neck dress was covered in roughly 480,000 beads and jewels and 25,000 feathers, with the beadwork alone taking the Lesage atelier about 1,155 hours by hand. It came with a two-meter train and a six-meter veil, and was built at Chanel’s headquarters at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris.
Put the two weddings side by side and you get the whole story of a modern celebrity marriage. One dress that fit in a garment bag and a room of eight people who watched them sign the paperwork. Another that took a Parisian atelier the better part of a year and a Sicilian palace to show off. The registrar’s signature was the marriage. Sicily was just the party the rest of us got to gawk at.
Which wedding would you have wanted — the hushed town-hall morning with the people you love, or the three-day fairy tale in a palace by the sea?
