The Real Reason Why Penelope Bridgerton's Wedding Dress Was Pink

There’s been much buzz about Bridgerton’s third season (which featured not one, but two weddings!), now that the final four episodes have been released. After Penelope Featherington (now Bridgerton) owned her pseudonym and revealed to the ton that she is, in fact, Lady Whistledown, all the puzzle pieces fell into place; her marriage to Colin recovered, her relationships with her estranged mother and sisters flourished, and her friendship with Eloise went back to the way it was. It was a happy ending, to say the least—but one of our favorite moments came right in the middle of all the drama, when everything was out of sorts. In arguably the best fashion moment of Bridgerton season three, Penelope walked down the aisle in a pale pink gown that took Colin’s breath away—but we can’t stop thinking about it, either.

Penelope’s wedding dress was a departure from the rest of of the bridal gowns we’ve seen on the show, which have been white—but Penelope’s look was always going to break the mold, says costume designer John Glaser. In fact, while the gown was decidedly different from Daphne Bridgerton and Edwina and Kate Sharma’s, which appeared during previous seasons, it was actually the truest to the period. “Wedding dresses at this time weren’t always white,” Glaser told Vulture. “It’s just that the modern audience thinks of them as white.”

The show’s costume design team didn’t land on the barely-blush shade right away, however; originally, the gown was going to be Bridgerton blue. “We started it off with a pale blue because she was marrying a Bridgerton, but it didn’t look quite right,” Glaser explained, noting that the goal was to find a shade that spoke to the fictional bride’s style evolution over the course of the season and that would flatter actress Nicola Coughlan’s skin tone. The costumer designer actually calls the final hue a cross between peach and pink; the color satisfied both of those prerequisites. The color was also selected to help Penelope, who works to find herself in the final four episodes, stand out in a color that is entirely her own. “In the church, you’ve got one side with the Bridgerton family all wearing blue, and on the other side are the Featheringtons wearing their garish colors,” he told the outlet. “No one in that world wears what we’ll call ‘peach.’”

But there was another reason why pink made the final cut when identifying Penelope’s wedding dress color, and it had to do with spotlighting another of her big-day accessories. “The other reason is her wedding veil is off-white. If the dress had been white, she would’ve looked like a nurse walking down the aisle with a white veil,” says Glaser of the chapel-length lace piece. “This way the veil becomes an accent.”

Penelope’s soft, simple, and romantic wedding dress silhouette—the garment was an easy silk A-line with flutter cap sleeves, a subtle V-neckline, and a tulle train—was also unexpected. “We thought, ‘Everyone is expecting some over-the-top wedding dress,’ but that’s not who she is anymore. It’s like the most stripped-down version of a dress. It has to be stunning and unexpected,” Glaser shared. “It’s not a caricature, and it’s not covered with flowers and trim. It’s just a beautiful shape to make her body look [beautiful].”

The garment was also practical: If you watch the wedding luncheon scene closely, you’ll realize that Penelope actually removes part of the dress to make dancing with her new husband easer. Despite the pale pink gown’s historical roots, this was a modern touch—convertible wedding dresses weren’t really a thing in Regency era England, after all.