“The crazy colorfulness was always there and wanting to come out,” shares bridal designer Madison Chamberlain. “I just had to find the correct path for it.” Madison began her fashion career in occasionwear, often crafting designs with over-the-top embellishment, color, and texture. While she got into a groove in the party dress department of Free People, the designer always found herself being asked to pare down her creations to make them more palatable for the brand’s aesthetic and price point. It was only when a bride came to her looking to create a rainbow disco ball dress for her New Orleans wedding that Madison found her niche. “She was so moved and blown away, which in turn made me so moved and blown away,” the designer remembers. Her new business was born, and she began creating bold veils and dresses for to-be-weds that were drawn to her multi-hued aesthetic.
While Madison admits she never pictured her own wedding day, she knew one thing for certain: “I never envisioned myself in white.” She first met her fiancé Jonáš Toupal in the summer of 2020. “He was getting his PhD in geochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. I was in the midst of building my business,” she says. The couple’s relationship moved quickly, with the pair moving in together soon afterwards and co-parenting a dog and cat. By September 2023, Jonáš proposed while the couple were visiting Madison’s hometown of Cape May, New Jersey.
Madison explains she couldn’t start crafting the wedding until they settled on a venue. At first, the pair considered a celebration in Jonáš’s home country of the Czech Republic. Then, they tried to find a location in between their two families. Finally, the couple settled somewhere closer to their Philadelphia home: The Inn at Barley Sheaf Farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. “It felt very folky Czech in a way, which is why we liked it,” shares Madison. “There were miniature horses, goats, and pigs, which sold it for me.” With the venue in place, the celebration would embrace the whimsical and vintage feel of the destination.
While the couple had help crafting the design for the party itself with their wedding planner, Madison tasked herself with designing her own wedding dress. This included a second look for later in the night. “I had a lot of friends whose weddings I’ve been in where they come up to me at midnight and say, ‘I have to get the hell out of this dress,’” she says. “I wanted to feel free.” A trip to Mood Fabrics with her mom helped her decide on the direction she would take. “I found this green, tattered, destroyed, embellished fabric in a bin,” she recalls. “I took it all apart and put it back into the dress.” The result was a sleeveless green gown with a beaded sweetheart neckline, a basque waist, and a full skirt complete with padded hips and a hoop.
Madison admits deciding on a dress design for herself was not easy. “If a client came to me and were like, ‘I want a dress with this sort of like detail and you run with the rest,’ I d be able to bang it out in an hour for them. But for me, I was like, ‘Oh my God. What do I want?’,” shares the bride. She notes that being able to bounce the ideas off her two full-time employees was incredibly helpful to get feedback and an outside perspective.
It ultimately took almost a year to complete the final sketch of her gown and two months to actually construct the piece. “When a nearlywed goes shopping, you pick your dress, you may have some fittings, and then you don’t see it for a while. I was with this bitch for hours,” she laughs. “I had a lot of full days where I was just sitting in front of the TV and just hand-sewing or cutting out my beading. By the end, everyone was like, ‘Do you love your dress?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. I’m so sick of looking at her.’” Despite the hard work that went into creating the gown, Madison says it all paid off. “It was everything I could have wanted and dreamed of.”
Another project the bride added to her plate? Crafting dresses for her mother and two bridesmaids. (She even designed special ties for the groomsmen and her bridesman.) Luckily, Madison says creating the designs for everyone else was much easier as she was less in her head.
Madison managed to keep her wedding dress a surprise from her fiancé throughout the entire design process. She took extra measures to keep it secret, even deleting videos on social media where it popped up in the background. “It was like a fun little surprise for him. Unfortunately, he guessed the color I was wearing the night before because I got my nails done and there was some green on them,” she says. “I was like, ‘You’re too observant!’”
When the wedding day arrived, guests were especially excited to see the runway show of Madison’s designs head down the aisle. “People started screaming and cheering at each person that walked out before me,” she shares. “So when I finally came out and did the reveal, everyone was like, ‘Woah!’ I literally started crying because I was just overwhelmed with joy.”
The reveal of her second look would also come with plenty of fanfare. The bride designed a bejeweled pink mini dress—and had a giant cake created so she could hop out of it for her entrance. The cake was designed to open up so the couple could easily step out in their party attire. She adds, “I did flash people purposefully when I got out of the cake.”
Reflecting on the celebration, Madison says, “The day just felt really electric, loving, and such a happy vibe. The feedback I’ve gotten from everybody was that it was the most fun wedding ever.” The bride admits that she took every design aspect of planning away from her husband and honestly loved seeing him in awe of it all. “It was cool to be able to do that for him,” Madison shares. “I already miss it so much.”
