🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

In Ginny & Georgia, Georgia Miller (Brianne Howey) knows how to take up space, and in the Season 2 finale, her very large belle-of-the-ball wedding dress couldn’t have taken up more space — literally — if it tried.

Georgia’s big Cinderella moment comes after years of hustling and getting by with questionable morals, but that just makes her fairy-tale wedding to Mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter) even more well earned. Howey particularly loved the play on the storybook princess finally getting her happily ever after. “Georgia’s wedding is so far from what kind of a wedding I had or things that I wanted,” Howey tells Tudum. “But that makes it even more fun because when in my life would I ever wear a —”

“Ten-foot-long wedding dress?” interjects Antonia Gentry, who plays Howey’s on-screen daughter, Ginny. 

And they aren’t exaggerating. Ginny & Georgia costume designer Julia Patkos confirms that the dress really was that long. Inspired by Cinderella’s dress in Disney’s 2015 live-action film adaptation (worn by Lily James and designed by Sandy Powell), Georgia’s wedding dress also became a character of its own. Just as Cinderella star Richard Madden joked that there were three people in the climactic dance between him and James in the film — Cinderella, Charming and the dress — the same thing went for Georgia, Ginny and the dress.

In Season 2, Episode 9, Georgia forgoes asking her maid of honor Ginny to walk her down the aisle to Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You” (which conveniently name-drops “Georgia” at the start). Instead, she requests that Ginny makes a speech to give her away at the wedding since, as Howey recalls, there was no way Ginny could fit in the aisle with the dress.

“The whole thing of walking down the aisle? Thwarted by this giant dress,” says Gentry. Patkos says that the production team even changed the location to accommodate the dress, but the space still wasn’t big enough. Even at the new location, there wasn’t enough room to fully expose the dress’ train in all its glory if Ginny also had to squeeze into the aisle next to her mom. “Walking next to it was pretty much impossible,” says Patkos.

While the final dusty blue dress was designed by Ines Di Santo, Patkos did consider a few other options “with less skirt circumference” to help the script and the location. Georgia ultimately wears a different, slinkier blue dress for her after-party look, but initially she was going to have the same dress for both the wedding and the reception. After the first fitting with “the dress,” though, “everybody fell in love. We knew that this was the dress, and we’d have to find a way to use it,” says Patkos. And after all, “Georgia deserves several wedding dresses.”

The rationale for Georgia’s after-party number was quite simple: They needed a dress she could dance in but also wear while navigating a staircase handcuffed, when she’s arrested in the middle of her wedding. Plus, the Cinderella dress just refused to fit into a police car. “I still remember Brianne mimicking her drowning in her own skirt in the car, not even being able to see out the window when we discussed it at the fitting,” says Patkos. “I was laughing so hard.”

Howey and Gentry also couldn’t stop laughing while filming their ride in the horse-drawn carriage to the wedding ceremony despite the frigid Toronto-in-March temperatures. “We were trying to hide the dress with the bouquet [in the carriage], and to see Toni just galloping up in this horse and carriage over and over again was so funny,” Howey says. 

At one point, they couldn’t even use the horse in the scene. Gentry had to walk behind a broom instead of arriving in the horse-drawn carriage in order to correctly capture where Howey needed to look for the shot. “The logistics of actually making things, of course, is weird,” says Howey. “It’s a great bonding experience and helps you not take yourself too seriously.”

To preserve the grand reveal of Georgia’s wedding dress, Patkos designed a custom-made white cape for Georgia inspired by the classic Balenciaga designs of the ’50s and ’60s along with Jackie Kennedy’s style. That cape also came in handy for more practical reasons during the carriage scene. Since the actual wedding dress was extremely fragile and way too big, Howey wore a significantly smaller and shorter dress during the carriage scene to allow her to get in and out more easily — but, thanks to the cape, you’d never know.

The carriage ride proves to be a very sentimental moment for Ginny and Georgia in the series, and it’s one that Howey will never forget. “I felt like it was the end of a rom-com riding off into the sunset together,” she says.

It remains to be seen if Georgia (and Paul) will live happily ever after now that their wedding was so cruelly interrupted. But, hey, at least they had their fairy-tale ceremony once upon a time. 

Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia is now streaming.