Notes on Lana Del Rey's 'Trashy Diva' Wedding Dress

TMZbroke the news that Del Rey and Jeremy Dufrene had picked up a marriage license on Monday, September 23. The Daily Maillater corroborated the report with photos, which showed the pair and their small reception in Des Allemandes, Louisiana, “the same bayou where Dufrene operates his popular swamp boat tours.” She could be seen in pictures walking down the aisle with her father, Robert Grant, with sister and brother Caroline Grant and Charlie Hill-Grant also in attendance. According to the outlet, “For the reception, Lana added a light blue satin bow to her ponytail for 'something blue.'”

It is her first wedding, and Dufrene’s second. Earlier this summer, a girl stepped forward claiming to be his daughter, which Lana infamously shut down with the simple comment “No” on Instagram. She added, “That’s not his daughter on Twitter.” Her only public comment on the entanglement came amidst a flurry of photos of the pair, at a festival in the U.K., at Karen Elson’s wedding in New York, at various swamp tours in Louisiana, where they apparently met. Speculation continues on whether this is more performance art from one of our most celebrated performance artists, or how long they’ve been dating, or if they have a prenup at all. But that certificate is signed! If it is an elaborate art installation ahead of her rumored country album, it’s certainly her most ambitious! If for nothing else other than that thrifted wedding dress, which she allegedly copped from a boutique in New Orleans called Trashy Diva.

Sometimes the joke writes itself for women like Lana.

TMZ claims the CINQ dress was thrifted back in May, months before her marriage. The outlet says it’s “unclear” if she was specifically shopping for wedding dresses that day, but “ended up falling for the dress she spotted in the window.” Their insider also claims it cost her no more than $400 dollars, retailing originally for about $2000. Interestingly, Billboardreported just a few days later that it had been custom-made, directly contradicting reports in TMZ that she’d thrifted it. According to CINQ designer Macye Wysner, her dress was “a custom CINQ gown made specifically for her,” noting it shared similar design elements to “The River” gown, another of the brand’s offerings.

It wouldn’t be her first time thrifting fashion for an important event, or scavenging in unlikely places. Back in June, Walmart was inundated with shoppers scrambling for an $11 top she was seen in. She also wore a $400 Dillard’s dress to the Grammy’s in 2020, breaking from the fashion world’s expectations for a global pop superstar.

Either Lana, the designer, or the random shop in New Orleans is lying about its origin. (Or they’ve obfuscated that it was merely altered with extraneous design elements.) But it doesn’t really matter, not at this point. That there’d be a discrepancy about where the dress itself came from at all is proof of this, however silly. It was made just for her because it is more romantic, more truthful, to this next story she’s trying to tell.

So much of the character of Lana Del Rey, the persona she’s built and then shattered and rebuilt again from the shards, is about artifice. Consider her early breakthrough with the “Video Games” music video, with its oft-told origin story about editing it herself. Or the anachronistic stylings of the Lana Del Rey EP and its successor, the LP Born to Die. Much has been said of her contemporary Taylor Swift’s use of “lore” or “easter eggs,” but more than any other, Lana has built an impenetrable wall of pure myth around herself. She is at once a poet and a megamillionaire and an otherwise average woman in the South in Walmart jewels and a thrifted wedding dress with an alligator-wrangling husband at their bayou wedding.

This latest development in her enormous performance of life itself is one she has finely tuned to this moment in the years since Chemtrails Over the Country Club. It is also not much different than her full tilts at disaffected and drug-hazy millennial youth, or jaded WASP exile, or prison wife, or tortured Los Angeles pop celebrity. There is a shot of her in the now-infamous “Ride” video clutching an American flag against the backdrop of the desert, a messianic figure, the rotten dream of the American West made manifest. In it, she whispers to the audience: “I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me that I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.”

The video itself, and the era that accompanied it, have become something of a stain on her legacy. Funny, as she warned us from the beginning of the driving force behind her art. No moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality. There will likely be a greater album than Did you know… at the end of her life with Dufrene, evidenced by the complex evolution of her artistic output over the last 15 years. She will trim it in lace and swamp water, just like her wedding dress, and sing of haunted places — bayous and magnolia groves and even her soul.

Thus endures Lana Del Rey, a woman with nobody to be but everyone else. A woman whose performance of the great story America tells about itself has been polished against the changing times. A mirror through which to look at ourselves — look at her, love her, loathe her. Yet there she is, a visage staring back from the placid surface of the bayou.