“The first time I wore the bespoke suit was on the morning of the wedding,” Jamie recalls. “I remember putting on the jacket and worrying that it wouldn’t close. But then it zipped up, didn’t wrinkle, and everything fit perfectly. It felt a little like armor, but also like myself .” Alex confirms how authentic her boyfriend’s appearance was when she finally confronted him at the ceremony: “I fell to my knees because I was so in awe of how beautiful Jamie was.”
The bride’s wedding dress was also custom made
As an avid lover of vintage, Alex initially didn’t want to design her dream wedding dress herself, with a Renaissance-inspired silhouette and cape, but rather choose it in a vintage shop. “But when you’re looking for the perfect vintage piece, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” she says. “When it comes to vintage shopping in Australia, you can’t just go out and say, ‘I’m going to try on ten dresses. You could go to ten shops and just try on one dress.’ After five months of (fruitless) searching, Alex finally went to a wedding salon with a friend and hated the experience. “It wasn’t for me,” he concludes. “So I decided, ‘If it’s not going to be vintage, I guess I’ll have to do it realize.'”
The inspiration for her wedding dress was a Chanel look that Claudia Schiffer wore in the 1990s
Alex then looked for further inspiration to realize his vision of a bespoke cream design with hints of black. She soon came across a photo of Claudia Schiffer at the 1992 Chanel show. Alex sketched out the idea for the design, which would be “Claudia Schiffer above and ethereal below”, and asked her stylist friend Fleur Egan for help. . “I asked her and she just said, ‘Leave it to me. I’ll buy you this dress,'” the bride says. The two designed the dress together and then took the idea to the Sydney couturier Olivia Deur, who designed the final garment. “I could tell she had a passion that far surpassed anyone else’s. Plus, she lived in Paddington, which is 15 minutes from my house.”
Alex jokes that Egan was her “fairy godmother” and discourages her from replicating the heavy fabric of the Chanel look. Since the wedding was taking place in Australia in January, she would be wearing too much material. Instead, they chose a lightweight, chiffon-like silk material, which they used to create numerous layers of skirt to create volume.
The bride also had a lace cape made
The hooded cape was actually Alex’s first idea for her bridal look, just a week after their engagement. “I designed it myself,” she says. “I wanted to incorporate lace, but not on the dress.” So the cape was made of vintage lace and had tight sleeves that turned into gloves. She took inspiration from Kate Bosworth’s 2018 Met Gala look and added pearls to frame her face around her cowl.
