Rules of Engagement
Last year the blowout bash became a stoopside celebration, the destination fête a backyard barbecue. But will the micro-wedding last? asks Lilah Ramzi.
Will micro-weddings last? asks Lilah Ramzi
“On paper, we’ve only been together for around two and a half years,” says the painter Ivy Getty of her relationship with photographer Toby Engel. But in this pandemic-prompted, dog-year-style acceleration we’re living through, she reckons it’s been longer: “If you’re spending lockdown with somebody, it’s like you’re together for triple the time.” Throngs of other pandemic-era loves have matched this pace—a 2020 trend dubbed the “turbo relationship.” “It was like we pressed fast-forward,” Getty says. “But it didn’t feel rushed.” Still, when Engel proposed last summer, at a restaurant in Capri, Getty was taken aback. Only when he produced his mother’s sapphire ring did she realize what was happening. This November, the couple will marry at the San Francisco manse that once belonged to her grandmother Ann—an antiquarian who filled the home with 18th-century furnishings and Chinese-export porcelain.
Getty’s celebration will be just one of what is sure to be a post-pandemic nuptials boom. According to wedding planner Stefanie Cove, many of “the newly engaged are pushing to tie the knot this year,” while those who had to postpone their 2020 celebrations have been busily sending out invitations. “Calendars may be booking up quickly!” she says. In a poll conducted by wedding site Over the Moon in May of 2020, more than half of respondents said that they were rescheduling their weddings; the percentage ticked upward as the gloom of 2020 persisted.
Madeline Hollander is among the many brides who adjusted their timelines. She’s an artist, a dancer, and a choreographer (whose solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art is up through August 8), and her fiancé, Sam Parker, is the founder of Parker Gallery in Los Angeles. Their relationship began at an after-party for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, when Hollander was scouring the ground for an earring. “I was on my hands and knees with my iPhone flashlight, just crawling around,” she says. Parker tapped her on the shoulder, the missing hoop in hand, and less than a year later they were engaged. Their September 2020 wedding was postponed till May, when, by an oak tree in the groom’s parents’ backyard, the ceremony finally took place. This August, Alexandra Michler, Vogue’s Director of Fashion Initiatives, will wed art consultant Will Kopelman just eight months after getting engaged. Both she and her fiancé grew up spending summers on Nantucket, where they will marry, but it’s also where they passed those early pandemic days—“just in this gray place, making the most of it,” Michler says. “I think if you can survive that, the rest of your lives are looking pretty good.”
Of course, many a pandemic wedding did take place, albeit in a scaled-back form. We saw couples get married on flower-filled stoops, in Brooklyn backyards, and on crowd-limited Big Sur cliffs. Raven-Symoné married Miranda Pearman- Maday on a patch of lawn, Lily Allen and David Harbour eloped to a Las Vegas chapel, and Princess Beatrice wed Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in what was surely the most underpopulated wedding in royal history. I witnessed my own sister recite her vows in the Arizona desert to a party of 10. The couple had planned a weeklong extravaganza involving spice and flower-strewn ceremonies and a bigger-is-better fireworks display. Instead, they held on to what mattered to them and ditched the rest. For the groom, that meant the Seven Steps that are traditional in the Indian wedding; for the bride, it meant wearing a Chantilly-lace Monique Lhuillier dress.
Such recalibration has also entered fashion, with designers racing to help outfit this new-age bride. Earlier this year, Erdem—which had never before offered ready-to-wear bridal—released a collection of gauzy pieces that achieved an elusive happy medium between full-on bridal gowns and white-colored dresses. In March, Simone Rocha also ventured into the category, sending her brides down the aisle in ballet- slipper pink. “Our girls are gravitating toward more classic, streamlined silhouettes,” says Markarian designer Alexandra O’Neill (maker of Dr. Jill Biden’s Inauguration Day ensemble), whose dresses somehow evoke idyllic romance and cool-girl irreverence at once. Since last year, sales on Over the Moon of a particular Alexia María midi-length dress have surged. “The price point is great for a wedding dress,” says Alexandra Macon, the site’s cofounder, “and it really lends itself to a smaller event.”
This fall, menswear designer Emily Adams Bode—who has sparked a particular kind of wistful nostalgia for fashion’s bygone days—also has plans to tie the knot. Though details for the ceremony are still under construction, she’s gone ahead with some suiting. Her fiancé, Aaron Aujla, cofounder of design firm Green River Project, will wear a custom-made ensemble in a color somewhere between saffron and marigold on the eve of the wedding ceremony. “We’ve talked a lot about this color over the years,” Aujla says. “It’s a really specific tone, and I think we’ve found it.” As for the bride, she’ll make her own dress—something that meditates on the idea of timelessness. “It’s important for me to look as though I could have come from any era,” she says.
In San Francisco, Getty will honor her bohemian spirit by enlisting Maison Margiela for her wedding look. “I was so uncomfortable at the beginning,” she says of the collaboration with Margiela’s John Galliano. “I didn’t want to influence what he was doing. I chose Galliano because I trust him.” Michler meanwhile, has been surprised to find herself going a more reduced route. “I’m gravitating toward simpler shapes,” she says. “It’s something I didn’t expect.” As for Hollander, she doesn’t quite remember where she first came across the sea-foam-colored Haute Couture Valentino gown that she set her sights on. Once she tracked it down and tried it on, she was delighted to find it was a perfect fit: “There was nothing that the tailor had to do, no alterations whatsoever.” But when Hollander wed her husband before an audience of 40 vaccinated guests half a year behind schedule, the dress needed a bit of work. “By then, I was five months pregnant!” she explains. @