Dressed for Bridal Excess

Academy Award-inning costume designer Albert Wolsky may not want to see another wedding dress for a while.

He designed five for the new romantic comedy “Runaway Bride,” which opens next Friday and stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts.

The film follows the escapades of Maggie (Roberts), a young woman famous for getting cold feet at the last minute by running out on her wedding ceremonies.

Wolsky, who has won awards for “All That Jazz” and “Bugsy,” says creating costumes for the film was interesting and problematic.

“They scheduled four weddings in the first two weeks of shooting, so I had to produce everything very quickly.” (Filmed on location in Baltimore, the production team was racing to beat the onset of winter and preserve the film’s autumn setting.)

“Each wedding is very different, so each dress had to solve a different design problem. The first four weddings finish in a dash, so the designs had to satisfy the physicality of the scenes. Each dress also had to give the feeling of a time difference,” he explained.

The results? One dress with an abnormally long train, one with a homemade hippie look, one powder puff gown that survives a galloping horse ride, and two contemporary off-the-shoulder looks.

Photographs of all five dresses were not released to the press because Roberts preferred to release only selected shots, said Gregg Brilliant, a Paramount spokesman.

One not released was Wolsky’s favorite, a lace gown with bell-shaped sleeves from Maggie’s Grateful Dead period. It was Roberts’ idea to accent the look by placing daisies in her hair.

“She’s very collaborative. But by the time she was putting on her fourth wedding dress, she said, ‘Albert, this is nothing personal, but I hate wedding dresses.’ It may have been one wedding dress too many for her,” Wolsky said.