Spoilers for Season 3, Episode 9 of Only Murders in the Building are ahead. If you aren’t caught up on the mystery, you can stream the series with a Hulu subscription.
I’m sure many of you reading this saw those mysterious photos of Selena Gomez in a wedding dress on the set of Only Murders in the Building a few months ago. While we’ve been clueless as to how the gown plays into Season 3 of OMITB, we finally got some answers during Episode 9. Along with said answers, CinemaBlend also got the inside scoop on how the ensemble came together from the show’s costume designer Dana Covarrubias. And, let me tell you, this story is almost as rushed and serendipitous as the circumstances the dress is used for in the show.
During the Only Murders immersive pop-up experience in New York City, I spoke with Dana Covarrubias about the costumes featured on the fashionable show. Considering images of Selena Gomez in that wedding dress went viral long before Season 3 aired, I had to ask about how they found the gown. The story, it turns out, was as last-minute as how Mabel ended up with the dress in the show. The Emmy-nominated designer told CinemaBlend:
It was a tricky one. Because we didn't know up until a week before what the dress really needed to be, because we didn't have a script yet. So we knew that the dress was very involved in the plot. And so we knew it had to be something specific, but we didn't know what that was until we got the script.
Well, when they got the script, they found out the dress was Joy’s (Andrea Martin), and she was going to wear it when she and Charles (Steve Martin) got married (however, they broke up). The dress was just sitting in his apartment, and the trio needed a way to get into a courthouse quickly to make it to Loretta’s (Meryl Streep) arraignment hearing. Mabel, Gomez’s character, realized the wedding dress was the perfect distraction, because no one would stop a woman on her wedding day. Continuing to tell the story of how they found this dress, and with the script in mind, Covarrubias told me:
So once we got the script, it was like all hands on deck, like let's find something that works. But as we all know, sometimes it can take eight weeks for wedding dresses to come. So we were really limited in our options of what we could find; we really had to find something just off the rack. So we ended up going to David's Bridal, which is hilarious. And we found something that worked that fit all the things that it needed to fit plot-wise and script-wise. It checked all those boxes, and it looked beautiful on her.
Isn’t it wild that they took a dress off the rack from David’s Bridal and turned it into a gorgeous vintage gown? I was already in awe of the gown and the show before learning this, and then hearing how they put it all together last minute, made it even better. After they said yes to the dress, Covarrubias and her team worked some movie magic to make the piece perfect for Gomez and the story, she explained:
And we did our little, you know, costume tricks to make it look better than what it was off the rack. So we replaced the lining – it had this really bright intense lining, it was like bright, bright, bright, almost too bright like a blue light. We just took that out and replaced it with a really nice lining that was sort of like a more textured ivory color that just made it look like a much richer piece of clothing. And then we added little cute lace gloves and a beautiful veil and all those elements. And I think they look really turned out.
It really did turn out! Selena Gomez looked gorgeous, as always, and the dress fit into the story perfectly. Not only did the gown make for an immaculate distraction for Mabel, Charles and Oliver (Martin Short) to storm into the courthouse, but it’s also another example of how dedicated and creative the OMITB costume team is – especially in a pinch. The show has always had a fabulous style, and this wedding dress added to it.
To see the dress for yourself, and to figure out who is at the top of your OMITB suspect list for Season 3, you can stream the first nine episodes on Hulu. Then, next Tuesday, October 3, make sure to tune in, because the final episode of the critically acclaimed third season of Only Murders in the Building will be dropping on the 2023 TV schedule. This means we’ll finally find out who killed Ben Glenroy – and hopefully, we’ll get to see a bit more of Selena Gomez’s gorgeous wedding dress too.
