Oct 20, 2020

The Most Expensive Wedding Dresses in History

Finding the perfect wedding dress is every bride’s dream and walking down the aisle wearing that picture-perfect gown is such an important and memorable aspect of the big day. With the average bride spending £1,313 on their dream gown, making sure it’s ’the one’ is just as important as finding the perfect soulmate to marry. But what if you had an unlimited budget to spend on your big day?

The cost of the dress will start to go up when special embellishments or custom designs are requested, or when it’s purchased from a high-end designer. In the luxury bridal sphere though, these requests are part and parcel of the experience.

From fashion royalty to actual royalty, who has the most expensive wedding dress of all time? Our wedding card specialists have put together a comprehensive list of some of the most iconic wedding dresses from over the years to see who in the celebrity world went a little OTT when it came to the cost of the dress for their big day.

Top 3 most expensive wedding dresses in the world

Serena Williams

Price of the gown: $3,500,000 / £2,695,000
Adjusted for inflation: $3,711,297 / £2,857,698
Designer of the gown: Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen

Taking the top spot for the most expensive wedding dress of all time is tennis queen, Serena Williams. Working closely with Sarah Burton, creative director of Alexander McQueen, Serena’s wedding gown was simply a masterpiece. Sporting a full ball gown silhouette, strapless sweetheart neckline and a cape that billowed, the dress for her ceremony will go down in wedding dress history. And with a price tag of £2.8 million, it’s going to be a pretty tough one to beat.

Victoria Swarovski

Price of the gown: $1,000,000 / £770,000
Adjusted for inflation: $1,060,370 / £816,485
Designer of the gown: Michael Cinco

Decked out with over 500,000 crystals, the Swarovski jewellery heiress's custom-made gown sure did sparkle on her big day back in 2017. Weighing in at roughly 100 pounds, the million-dollar wedding dress was finished off with a 26-foot long, laced-edged veil. If this isn’t the epitome of princess elegance we don’t know what is.

Grace Kelly

Price of the gown: $60,000 / £46,200
Adjusted for inflation: $573,349 / £441,478
Designer of the gown: Helen Rose

The woman who started it all, Princess Grace Kelly’s dress inspired wedding dress dreams for brides all over the world. Designed by Helen Rose, the timeless high-neck long-sleeve gown featured thousands of hand-sewn pearls and 125-year-old lace from Brussels. The original bridal fashion icon looked nothing short of stunning and has provided us with decades worth of wedding inspiration.

Methodology

We conducted research into the most expensive wedding dresses in history, focusing specifically on celebrities and members of the royal family from all over the globe. For each wedding dress, we sourced the reported cost of the wedding dress using a variety of sources, which you can view here.

For each dress, we also then calculated how much the garment would be worth in 2020 financial terms using this US Inflation Calculator.