The LA Times has interviewed Harry Potter costume designer Jany Temine as part of their Hero Complex countdown to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. In the interview she discusses the costumes for Bill and Fleur’s wedding.

“The film is so dark and the beginning of the really dark time, and it was the last opportunity to have something light and warm and funny and the last light tone before all the darkness,” Temime said. ”The terrible time follows. So it was very nice for us to give it the maximum. It’s like when you look at pictures of weddings  right before the war. They look happy but there’s the edge to it, too. Like if you saw the film ‘The Deer Hunter’ and they had that wedding before everything got so dramatic. They are embracing life. When you are almost sure you are going to lose your life, you appreciate the moment and you live for the moment. That was my approach to that wedding scene of ours. Everyone is trying to get the maximum.”

What are the costumes like? “For the wedding dress, I wanted it to be a witch wedding dress but not a Halloween dress. The dress is white but it needed to have something fantastic to it. So there is the phoenix [motif], the bird, which is a symbol of love in a way  because there is rebirth, love never dies, it is born again. So we have that in front of the dress to give a feeling of eternal love. It was the symbol of Dumbledore, too, but it is the symbol of love for the dress.”

“It’s a world parallel to us, it’s a secret society living next to the other world, our world. They have their way and their own culture but they cannot ignore the real world, they are next to it always. They constantly have access to it. So I looked at extreme cultures, or the fringe or the outsiders. Any parallel society, like the gypsies or political groups on the edge. They have their own way of doing things but they also live in 2010 and they cannot ignore what they see.  So they have their pointed hats and their long robes and they have their couture, but they also have blue jeans. They have their traditions but they cannot ignore the modern world.”