How Céline Dion’s Bold Wedding Day Fashion Landed Her In the Hospital

A lot of wedding vows have that sickness/health, richer/poorer type language, but perhaps couples preparing to walk down the aisle should take heed of Céline Dion’s example and include something along the lines of “when the iconic yet very heavy accessory I wear at our wedding sends me to the hospital.”

When the singer married René Angélil in 1994, she wore a massive seven-pound headpiece adorned with some 2,000 Swarovski crystals, covering most of her forehead and soaring high above her head, her veil attached and trailing behind her.

In a video with Vogue France this week detailing some of her most iconic looks throughout her storied career, the 54-year-old “My Heart Will Go On” singer shared that the tiara had to be sewn to her hair to keep it firmly in place, and she had to practice walking while wearing it to make sure she could hold up its weight.

“I practiced and everything is smooth and everything is fine, but when I had to walk in the cathedral, it’s no wooden floor, it’s a carpet,” she said of one possible trip-up. “I had an immediate facelift. And it’s like, ‘Am I going to make it? Am I going to make it to my future husband? But like I said, ‘Oh, I’m Gonna Run to You.’ I did.”

“When you’re so happy, there’s no weight, there’s no problem, there’s no pain,” she said.

At the end of the night, however, when it came time to un-sew the headpiece from the newlywed, the drama behind the dramatic accessory began.

“I had a cut because the pressure was too much,” she said of her discovery at the end of the night. “The next day, I wake up I look at myself in the mirror, I have the size of an egg in the middle of my forehead… It’s so huge that it makes my eyes [go cross-eyed].”

She went to the hospital and was prescribed antibiotics to help heal the fashion-inflicted wound. Despite it all, Dion doesn’t have any regrets about her wedding day look.

“This is a moment that will be with me for the rest of my life,” she gushed. “The dress couldn’t have been big enough. I could’ve had three times the size on my head. I could’ve had six different dresses that night because he was, and still is, such a wonderful human being. He brought [out] the best in me. He really did.”

Angélil, who was also Dion’s manager, died in 2016 at the age of 73 after multiple cancer diagnoses. The couple shared three sons. In an interview also published earlier this week by French Vogue, in which Dion also shared an update on her own battle against the degenerative neurological condition Stiff Person Syndrome, the singer told the story of the first time she met her future husband. She was just 12 years old, and had recorded a demo. Angélil was solely Dion’s manager for years before their relationship expanded and became romantic.

“I was a bit scared and anxious, so I stuck close to my mother,” she said of that first meeting. “We went into a building, into a lift, into an office with gold records and a secretary… And then he opened the door. This man, who was very handsome, very well dressed, very classy, asked me: ‘Can you sing a little bit of the song for me? Singing in front of just one person is worse than performing for a crowd of 20,000.’ He gave me a pencil and said: ‘Imagine this is a microphone. Yes, that’ll do!’ He wanted to make sure that it was really me singing on the demo. While I was singing, he started crying. That’s how I met René.”

In the interview, she discussed her will to work every day and enjoy her life, and that she’s stopped asking herself why she has been stricken with her condition.

“Do I have any regrets? I don’t know, I don’t know and I don’t care because the stage, my family, my children and my songs have taught me everything I know,” she said. “There’s life, school, the arts, emotion, passion, secrets, desires, gifts. People question life all the time. Stop questioning life, we should be living it. It’s not always beautiful, but it’s here.”