A New York City Wedding With Colombian Spirit at the Lotos Club
Olivia Watts met her now-husband, Thomas, on Tinder in 2017. Tom proposed with his mother s engagement ring one night after watching Hidden Figures, one of her favorite movies. They were married shortly after—six months after their first date, to be exact—in a tiny ceremony in their apartment with her mom and best friend there to witness. “It was all very intimate,” Olivia recalls. “After that, we went to dinner at our favorite restaurant to celebrate.”
Five years later, having a larger reception wasn’t a matter of making things official, but of honoring the couple’s connection with the people they love the most—who are usually scattered between the West Coast, Europe, and Colombia. It was also a family reunion of sorts, like many weddings have been in 2021 and 2022, as countries have lifted their respective pandemic-related travel restrictions.
“I could tell the crowd was truly eclectic during the rehearsal dinner,” Olivia remembers with a laugh. Latin American weddings don’t usually include speeches, but her guests did theirs anyway, which she says came with its fair share of tongue ties and mistakes: “And then you saw Tom’s friends, so confident and articulate! But he assured me it didn’t matter how messy it all got; it was really lovely.”
Dinner was served at Per Se, where the bride wore a dress she d designed herself. “The embroidery took three months to make in Colombia, all by the same person,” she recalls. She later changed into the same Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress that Carrie wore in the last episode of And Just Like That... She couldn’t resist the magnolia print on Carrie’s: “I just fell in love with it.”
Olivia was born and raised in Barranquilla, a city famous for its Carnival and for being the birthplace of Shakira. She moved to New York in 2016 after studying fashion design in Bogota and worked as a makeup artist for a while alongside her long-time friend, photographer Andres Oyuela. Shortly after marrying Tom, chairman of Watts Capital Group and an Oregon native, in their Manhattan apartment in 2017, Olivia went back to school—Parsons this time—to study fashion design: “I started in a one-year program that is meant to prepare foreigners for college. I was definitely the oldest one!” She never attained the BFA in fashion design she had in mind; 2019 was instead a pivotal year due to her gender confirmation surgery in Thailand—“a rebirth,” she calls it—and then the pandemic happened. Watts still launched her eponymous line of hyper-feminine dresses and intricate gloves on Thanksgiving of 2020. The fabrics came from Italy, and she worked with a team in Medellin, Colombia on the manufacturing.
Tom and Olivia wanted their wedding to have an old New York vibe, so The Lotos Club, where the groom is a member, made perfect sense. “It was really a dream come true,” Olivia says. The ceremony took place at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. The bride wore a custom Vera Wang strapless dress, cinched at the waist, wrapped with illusion lace from the neck down to the wrists with an ample A-line skirt.
Tom’s tuxedo was handcrafted at Martin Greenfield Clothiers Brooklyn factory, the same tailors responsible for dressing presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and for making David Byrne’s extraordinary “American Utopia” gray suits.
“I always had this idea of renting a giant shuttle bus like the Met [Gala], because I wanted to go [to the church] standing up so I wouldn t have any problems with the dress,” Olivia says. “I did not want an old car, nor did I want a sedan, but rather this giant shuttle bus where I could go with my entire bridal party.” She got her wish, and arrived to the church in grand fashion.
After the ceremony, they made their way to the Lotos Club for the reception, and Olivia went up to her room to change into a column Oscar de la Renta dress with an elegant V-neck and Cornelia James lace opera gloves.
“I am very proud of my roots, so it was important for me to have some hints of my culture at the wedding," she says. A Cuban son band called Mélange playing live Latin jazz, boleros, and early salsa, and a dress by Alfredo Barraza, a quintessential designer for Colombia’s beauty queens, ticked the boxes.
“It was so interesting to see how everyone coexisted in this very American atmosphere,” recalls Sebastian Cabrices, a Venezuelan friend and writer based in Milan. “Tom’s side, very gringo, with Olivia s family and friends that are as Colombian as they can get, all from Barranquilla. Right in the middle of the wedding dinner, the band started playing full-on salsa, and half of the party—Olivia included—stopped eating to stand up and dance. You just couldn t stop them from being Latinos. Dinner was served, but the salsa was served too.”
Olivia had planned to wear her Alfredo Barraza cocktail dress—ostrich-feathered with tiny sequins embroidered to the base for extra carnival shine—but time flew with all the salsa dancing, and before she knew it, the party had only 15 minutes left. “I wanted to enjoy every single second, so I decided to stay and dance a little longer,” she says. There will be time for that dress to make its debut, perhaps on a New Year’s Eve in Cartagena, or when the couple celebrates their next anniversary.
Photo: Natural Expressions NY1/32Tom and I rehearsing at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church with the entire wedding party! I’m wearing a couture dress I designed that took approximately 92 days of hand embroidery.
Photo: Natural Expressions NY2/32Ready for the rehearsal dinner!