Actor Vicky Krieps’s Rose-Covered Vivienne Westwood Wedding Gown Was a Tribute to Her Late Grandmother
“I’m not the kind of girl who necessarily thought I would get married,” say Vicky Krieps, who just tied the knot in an appropriately cinematic celebration in northern Greece. While she didn’t grow up “window gazing at wedding dresses,” the Phantom Thread star has always had a soft spot for Vivienne Westwood’s romantic yet rebellious designs. “I saw a dress of hers years ago and I remember thinking, if I was to get married in anything, it would be this.”
It was two years ago, when the mother of two arrived in Greece to shoot Hot Milk, that Krieps’s perspective on marriage suddenly changed. “I really didn’t see it happening,” she says. “I work so much, I have kids, how anyone else could fit in [to my life]… I didn’t see it.” Then she encountered Lazaros Gounaridis, who was part of the crew on set. “To be honest, I think we saw each other the first time and we knew we would not leave each other,” Krieps says now, adding that she feels “very lucky.” “I know it doesn’t happen very often… it had never happened to me before.”
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Still, happen it did, and before long, the César Award nominee Krieps, who is from Luxembourg, found herself thinking back to that Westwood gown she’d seen all those years ago. “It almost looked like someone just threw clothes at a body, the way [the fabric] drops in a perfect way. It had all the tradition and craftsmanship of a wedding dress, but it was also kind of punk.”
Having briefly considered getting married in a silk pajama set, the actor decided on a whim to reach out to team Westwood. “I contacted them, thinking, I have this feeling that Vivienne Westwood would like me, even looking down from the sky.” The team then invited Krieps to attend the brand’s 2025 first bridal couture show, which was staged in Barcelona in April. “I went, and I met [Vivienne Westwood’s husband and now creative director of the house] Andreas Kronthaler, and we just fell in love with each other. [Trying on dresses] was like, I wish we could do this forever!”
Krieps ended up selecting three Vivienne Westwood gowns for her celebrations: a draped Grecian number for the eve of the wedding, a corseted mini for the party, and most special of all: a white princess gown decorated with pink Edwardian roses for the ceremony itself. “I have this thing with roses, because of my grandmother,” she says. “I have one photo of her where she has all these flowers. I had originally thought I would get married in pajamas because I’m not really that dress kind of girl, but then I remembered my grandmother, from when I was 12 years old, making me swear I’d get married in a white dress!”
Reflecting on it now, the bride thinks there was a certain amount of magic involved in the whole experience. “Obviously my original idea for the pajamas was about being humble, because I don’t need dresses.” In the end, she says, the journey towards choosing her gown became a lesson in “allowing myself to dream big. It was almost like my grandmother and Vivienne Westwood had a little chat up there and said, let’s make this happen.”
Gounaridis proposed to Vicky at Christmas, and planning the wedding was—a little like their love story—a whirlwind affair. “It’s all been very spontaneous,” the bride says. “My schedule is always crazy. The kids were off school that weekend so we just picked it! I feel like I just follow my instinct and it always leads me right. Sometimes people say, ‘oh, this is too rash’. But it ended up being more perfect than I could have dreamed of.”
The couple settled on the groom’s parents’ holiday home in northern Greece as their venue, with Krieps keen to incorporate the ocean somehow. “I wanted everyone to jump in the water when we said yes, but no one agreed because of their outfits,” she says. Instead, the bride opted to arrive by fishing boat instead of walking down an aisle, accompanied by her children. “That was symbolic, as he was marrying not only me but also my two kids.”
As the trio made their way to the wedding, the man steering the boat pointed out some dolphins. “He said, you can see them from afar, but they’ll swim away—they don’t come towards the bay. I looked, and they came right at us. They swam with us, like a dolpin delegation! In that specific moment, I knew that I was on the right path.
