We found ourselves standing in a reception hall in Portland one Saturday in late August, watching a tower of cream puffs slowly settle under its own weight. The bottom tier had begun to lean about forty-five minutes into cocktail hour, and by the time the couple cut into the top one — a single, oversized…
We had the catering conversation seven months out, sitting across from a coordinator who kept mentioning “plated” and “passed” as if those were the only two options. The venue—a converted barn with long refectory tables already built into the floor plan—seemed to demand something that moved. We wanted people passing bowls, reaching across, asking for…
The idea came to us not over a tasting menu or a catering binder, but standing in line at a taco truck in a parking lot a few blocks from the reception venue. It was raining, the kind of steady February drizzle that soaks through a jacket in five minutes, and we were holding foil-wrapped…
This isn’t about fashion. Not really. It’s about magic — specifically, the kind of magic that happens when a bride changes clothes in the middle of her own wedding and, in doing so, changes everything about who she is perceived to be. The two-kimono tradition in rural Japan — iro-naoshi, or color-changing, layered over a…
Sixty dollars was the price tag attached to a handcrafted, besom-style broom at a wedding fair in Brooklyn last spring. The woman selling them, a craftswoman specializing in heirloom pieces, explained that the handle was made from reclaimed cherry wood and the brush from dried sorghum. It was a beautiful object, destined to hang on…
The glass beads catch the overhead light of the studio, and Priya, a jewelry designer who has been working with Indigenous-inspired motifs for seven years, flicks a finger across a string of Czech-cut seed beads in the color known as “old red.” It is not a bright red. It is the color of dried clay…
The real friction point in wedding planning is rarely the couple themselves. It’s the moment your mother presents you with a typed list of fourteen names from her office, and your partner’s father counters with a handwritten column of sixteen from his. I’ve watched this particular negotiation derail more dinner table conversations than any argument…
I started looking into this properly after a couple I know got married in September of last year. They had planned for a coastal ceremony in late autumn, expecting the usual seasonal rains but not a typhoon that parked itself over the peninsula for three days. Their venue lost power entirely, the access road flooded…
I’ve spent enough years covering weddings to know that the corkage fee conversation is where most couples lose their footing before they’ve even started. The venue hands you a contract with a number — $35, $45, sometimes $60 per bottle — and the assumption is that this is simply the price of doing business. It…
The decision came about three months before the wedding, during a tasting session at a bakery in Brooklyn where I sat staring at a three-tier sample that cost more than my first car. The woman behind the counter, a pastry chef named Aiko, watched me hesitate and said something I haven’t forgotten. “You know,” she…