Why Jodie Turner-Smith Wore a ‘Bridal’ Gown After Joshua Jackson Divorce

Jodie Turner-Smith knows her Met Gala gown looked “deliberately bridal” — and that was the point.

“This met gala was a very special one for me … my first stepping out on my own,” Turner-Smith, 37, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, May 8. “I had many thoughts after reading the short story that the theme was based on … but what I took away from it was a desire to represent both the power of nature and the delicacy of it.”

She added, “In nature, death is both an ending *and* a beginning. When you prune away that which is dead, new buds are free to grow. Fitting, then, that the dress #DanielLee designed for me, full of english flowers, was deliberately bridal. White, representing a rebirth. A clean start. A recommitment to the most important relationship I will ever have, the relationship from which all others grow: my relationship with myself.”

Turner-Smith stunned on the Monday, May 6, red carpet in a white Burberry halter dress. Lee, the creative force behind Burberry, added 150,000 crystal embellishments and a 6-meter train to the look to fit the event theme.

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The annual fashion benefit featured a “Garden of Time” dress code, based on the museum’s “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” Costume Institute exhibit. (Lee told Women’s Wear Daily that Turner-Smith’s gown was directly inspired by the crystal flowers that have the power to halt time in J.G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time” short story.)

“It is through loving and honoring myself that I am able to love and honor my daughter, and teach her to do the same,” Turner-Smith added in her Instagram note. “I am ever-changing, ever-growing, always beginning … and FREE, to love better, stronger, more fiercely and fearlessly than I ever have.”

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Turner-Smith, who married Joshua Jackson in 2019, filed for divorce in October 2023. She requested that the pair share joint custody of their 3-year-old daughter.

The actress has since made her peace with the end of her marriage, telling The Sunday Times in February, “Sometimes things we really want to work just don’t end up working. And that’s OK. The most important thing is that you choose what’s healthiest for you and your family and definitely your children.”

Jackson, 45, meanwhile, has moved on with Lupita Nyong’o.