By Gabriela Afanador
Thursday 25, June 2026
Photo via @dualipa on Instagram
When Dua Lipa and Callum Turner married quietly at Old Marylebone Town Hall in London on May 31st with eight people in the room, it was always clear that a second act was coming. That act arrived on June 5th in Palermo, and it lasted three days. The couple hosted approximately 200 guests across a series of celebrations that cost an estimated $1.7 million and that local Sicilian media described as the most significant event the city had seen since the filming of The Godfather in 1972. The venue for the ceremony was Villa Valguarnera, an 18th century Baroque palace in Bagheria outside Palermo, one of Italy’s most designated national historic landmarks, its interiors spanning stately ceremonial rooms, libraries holding over 15,000 volumes, and large terraces with unobstructed views of the sea, the same property that appeared in the opening credits of The White Lotus season two. The gardens were dotted with chairs draped in satin bows, guests received hand-embroidered handkerchiefs that read “stay mad with me forever” in a nod to Sicilian tradition, and handmade fans were placed on each seat to manage the late afternoon heat. Michelin-recognized chef Tony Lo Coco catered the wedding banquet, with Sicilian desserts cassate and cannoli served alongside the dinner. Elton John, who attended with his husband David Furnish, performed an acoustic rendition of Your Song at the piano for the couple, which is the kind of detail that either sounds entirely unbelievable or entirely inevitable depending on how you feel about the Biebers’ social orbit. The celebrations left an estimated 268 million euros of economic impact on the city’s metropolitan area according to a report by JFC research institute, a number that prompted a small group of protesters to gather outside with signs reading “Palermo is not for the rich,” the same activist group that had demonstrated at Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding in Venice the previous summer.
The guest list read like a very specific cross-section of the couple’s actual life rather than a performative gathering of names. Charli XCX and her husband George Daniel, Mark Ronson and his wife Grace Gummer, Joe Alwyn, Troye Sivan, Kevin Parker, Olivia Dean, and Donatella Versace were among those in attendance across the three days, photographed arriving at Palermo airport and mingling in the city’s streets and piazzas with the ease of people who had genuinely been invited rather than placed. The couple stayed in the Donna Franca Suite at the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea, a Rocco Forte property that also served as a filming location for The White Lotus, its most luxurious suite going for over $7,000 per night. The wedding photographs from the ceremony were shot by David Sims, whose images Lipa posted on June 20th with a two-word caption, Mr and Mrs, which had the effect that all the best captions do of making everything that needed to be said feel already said.
The Welcome Party, Thursday June 5th
Photo credit BACKGRID
The three days opened with a pre-wedding street party in the 18th century Croce dei Vespri square in the center of Palermo, which the couple transformed into a vintage bookstore, a direct reference to how they first met, both reading the same page of Hernán Díaz’s novel Trust at an afterparty in January 2024. It was an unusually personal gesture for an event of this scale, the kind of detail that made the whole thing feel less like a production and more like a celebration that actually belonged to the two people at the center of it. Friends and family gathered in the square while Lipa and Turner were photographed locking lips to cheers from the crowd, Callum in a relaxed tan suit with coordinating sunglasses, the whole evening carrying the easy warmth of a city that had clearly decided to make them feel at home.
For the welcome party Lipa wore a custom Bottega Veneta dress in the house’s signature leather Intrecciato weave, the basketweave construction that has defined the Italian house’s identity for decades, here applied to an evening gown with a low halter neckline, a completely open back, and a floor-sweeping skirt finished in feathers and fringe that gave the dress its movement and its drama. It was styled with the house’s matching feather-trimmed Andiamo clutch, and accessorized with Bulgari jewelry, a Serpenti necklace, a Serpenti watch, and a Tubogas Manchette bracelet, Lipa being a global ambassador for the Roman jeweler. The logic of the dress was clear and felt genuinely considered rather than simply luxurious, an Italian house for a celebration in Sicily, the Intrecciato technique and the feathers providing the kind of visual texture that the square’s stone architecture and warm evening light demanded. It was the kind of outfit that announced the weekend ahead without trying to compete with what was still to come.
The Ceremony, Saturday June 6th
Photo via @dualipa on Instagram
The ceremony itself took place at Villa Valguarnera on the Saturday evening, the Baroque gardens lit against the Sicilian sky, guests in their chairs with their handmade fans and their embroidered handkerchiefs, Elton John at the piano. Callum Turner arrived for the ceremony in a custom Louis Vuitton tuxedo designed by Pharrell Williams, a black single-breasted wool jacket worn over a pleated white evening shirt and satin-trimmed trousers, with a handcrafted red peony on the lapel that was the single most personal detail of an otherwise classically composed look. The exchange of vows was followed by a dinner by Michelin chef Tony Lo Coco and then a party with sets by DJs Carl Cox and others, the kind of evening that was reported by every outlet but that felt, from the outside, like it genuinely belonged to the people inside it.
The dress Lipa wore for the ceremony is the first Chanel Haute Couture wedding gown designed by Matthieu Blazy for a friend of the house, which is its own kind of landmark within a house that has been navigating a significant creative transition since his arrival. The relationship between Lipa and Blazy predates Chanel entirely, she wore his work repeatedly during his tenure at Bottega Veneta and attended his debut couture show at Chanel in Paris in March, and the gown reflects the depth of that ongoing conversation rather than a transactional commission. It was handcrafted at the house’s atelier at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris, with contributions from three of Chanel’s Maisons d’art: Atelier Montex hand-embroidered the gown with 480,000 beads, Lesage produced trompe l’oeil jewels requiring 1,155 hours of needlework, and Lemarié applied 25,000 feathers to the silhouette and the two-metre train. The veil extended six metres in tulle, hand-embroidered with beads and feathers and finished with hand-cut organza appliqués, and the shoes were custom white satin pumps by Massaro. The backless halter silhouette is the kind of shape that carries this level of embellishment without being consumed by it, the architecture of the gown doing the structural work that allows the craft on its surface to read as celebratory rather than excessive.
The Brunch, Sunday June 7th
The morning after the ceremony Lipa appeared for a post-wedding brunch in a look that shifted the register of the entire weekend toward something lighter and more intimate, as though the formal part was complete and what remained was purely pleasure. The shift was deliberate and it landed. Where the Friday had been dramatic and the Saturday operatic, the Sunday felt like the breath after all of it, relaxed and warm and entirely appropriate for a morning in Sicily with the people you are closest to.
For the brunch she wore a white lace Chloé dress layered over a white ruffled Chloé bikini, the sheer gown with its dramatically cascading ruffled sleeves sitting over swimwear in a combination that was equal parts romantic and beachy, the exact territory the Chloé aesthetic under Chemena Kamali has been occupying most convincingly over the last two years. The swan-shaped Chloé bag and two long pendant necklaces from the house completed a look that was bohemian without being casual, the kind of dressing that takes real confidence to land in a context this formal and that Lipa, having just spent two days in Schiaparelli and Chanel Haute Couture, wore with the ease of someone who had arrived at the end of something very well done.