Inside The Two Very Different Wedding Looks Of 'Enola Holmes 3'

After two films spent navigating the fog and formality of Victorian England, “Enola Holmes 3” is arguably something of a departure. The third installment in the Netflix movie series following the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes sees her end up in Malta, where a series of personal and professional calamities collide. For Academy Award-nominated costume designer Consolata Boyle, the shift in setting was a welcome one.

"That lovely feeling of Victorians by the sea we absolutely went to town on,” she tells The Set Set. “There was a great opportunity to change from the weight of the London look to something much cleaner, lighter, and brighter.” Gone are the heavy, dark-toned petticoat-layered dresses Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is known for, replaced with a wardrobe full of new colors, fabrics, and silhouettes. “It was a great joy to research and create,” she says of Enola’s new vacation-mode wardrobe, full of white linen pieces (which double as on-theme looks for a bride-to-be), looser skirts, and pieces with a Mediterranean influence.

However, before any of that, we meet Enola feeling and looking rather restrained in a figure-fitting, lace-covered gown on the morning of her wedding to Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge). As Boyle says, "Enola has grave doubts about formalizing this lovely relationship with Tewkesbury, so the wedding dress was a symbol of that formality, and she's uncomfortable with it." 

Before she can make it down the aisle, however, Enola’s dress is destroyed as she takes on what she thinks is an assassin following her carriage. The veil comes off first, then the bustle and the mile-long train, and lastly the crinoline, each piece discarded in a high-octane sequence that required multiple copies of the garment. "The feeling is that the character is trying to get out of that dress," Boyle says. "You can see it and you can feel it coming apart as she's trying to get back to some sort of state where she can move freely."

After realising that she does want to marry Tewkesbury, but just not live the conventional life of a lady, the pair tie the knot in an intimate cliffside wedding. In the spirit of throwing tradition out the window, Boyle also designed a rather unconventional wedding dress for this second ceremony. Featuring an off-the-shoulder neckline, a bunched waist tie, and a mantilla veil over her loosely flowing hair, the dress feels deliberately unstructured compared to the first wedding dress. "There isn't that formality," Boyle says. "The dress says a lot about how she hopes the relationship is going to evolve. They're equals now.” Similarly, whereas the first drew on Victorian wedding photography and adhered to a degree of historical accuracy, for the second, Boyle actually looked to more modern silhouettes and styles as well as the romanticism of the counter-culture pre-Raphaelite movement of the day. 

Tewkesbury's wardrobe traces his own loosening up across the film, from rigid, dark formalwear to a pale grey linen suit once he reaches Malta, and finally to an open shirt and waistcoat that mirrors Enola's own relaxed look in the closing scene. "He's brought along on a journey by Enola," Boyle says. "And thanks to her, he sees things differently by the end.”