Vogue’s Contributing Editor Wore Oscar de la Renta for Her Oceanside Wedding
Upon receiving the invitation to the wedding of Eaddy Kiernan and Teddy Bunzel (a sturdy cardstock festooned with crawling vines and sprigs of lavender) everyone knew to expect something magical—and for many reasons. Firstly, Eaddy and Teddy are one of those extraordinary couples so besotted with one another that they could restore romantic hope in even the most jaded. And secondly, Eaddy is well known as a contributing editor at Vogue and the mastermind behind several Met Galas. We were all in for a treat!
The couple was set up by mutual friends in September of 2017. As Eaddy explains, they “met at the Library of the Public Hotel, and spent the whole date nerding out over favorite books, and cracking each other up until we closed the place down.”
They would return to the spot just 17 months later, this time with their friends and family in tow, to toast their engagement which Teddy, a Director at BlackRock, had scrappily executed after his original plan fell through. It was a cold February afternoon in Manhattan. Eaddy was preoccupied with the planning and comedown from her goddaughter’s baby shower earlier that morning and didn’t realize what would transpire when Teddy suggested they finagle their way into the Fort Knox–like Gramercy Park by sweet-talking the concierge at the tony Gramercy Park Hotel, which allows its guests entry. She hadn’t realized that he had called in a favor beforehand (Teddy’s brother Max once worked at the hotel) and it wasn’t until he was down on one knee that she understood what was happening. He presented her with an antique, cushion-cut ring by Terry Betteridge (the Greenwich, Connecticut–based jeweler and a longtime family friend of the Kiernan’s) and she, of course, said yes.
They set a wedding date for six months after the engagement. For the unflappable Eaddy, who had also helped plan the recent nuptials for her boss Anna Wintour’s daughter, it was all the time she needed. (She had the planning talent of the Easton Events team on her side, too.) The venue was a given: It would be her family’s storied summer home in Newport, Rhode Island that had recently hosted her sister Lacy’s wedding and before that, Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding to a certain man by the name of Jack. “We’ve had so many hilarious and poignant family memories there over the years,” says Eaddy of her home, Hammersmith Farm, “and we were excited by the idea of giving our family and friends a taste of our dream Newport weekend.”
By all accounts, it was a dream indeed. On Friday, August 16, guests gathered at one of Newport’s most famed landmarks, Marble House, the “country cottage” as it was ironically dubbed by its original inhabitants, Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt. Inside, it’s a symphony of marble, both real and trompe l’oeil plaster. Outside, it’s an imposing Beaux-Arts building architected by Richard Morris Hunt—the man behind other esteemed buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Biltmore Estate (home to the Asheville set of Vanderbilts). Dinner was served on the terrace, which overlooks the Atlantic. Max served as a master of ceremonies for the evening which concluded when Eaddy’s brother Peter took the mic to deliver a bit of comedy that “brought the house down—people are still referencing it!” she says.
The following day, Eaddy slipped into her wedding dress, a custom gown designed by her close friend Fernando Garcia of Oscar de la Renta. “Fernando and I met a million years ago when we were both bottom-of-the-barrel assistants working on the styling of an Oscar de la Renta show,” Eaddy says. “It felt especially meaningful to have him at the helm of my wedding dress.” As for the direction she gave him, she explains she texted him “a Frankenstein-esque composite of my dream dress: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in the country at Le Petit Trianon meets Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina upon her return from Paris. Within minutes, he turned it into a beautiful (and highly dance-in-able) confection.”
“Of course, he totally nailed it! I was smitten from the first time I tried the dress on, a week before our wedding,” she adds. What Garcia produced was a two-piece gown that sent everyone over the moon. It was an ivory column constructed with layers of Alençon and Chantilly lace—just as delicious as the cream. The neck was scooped with perfectly undone grosgrain ribbon bows at the tops of the shoulders. The overskirt, a swath of voluminous silk faille, appeared almost like a peplum around Eaddy’s waist, giving her just the right amount of drama as she walked down the aisle. (The skirt would later come off to facilitate her signature dance move: the worm.)
She accessorized with girandole earrings and an Art Deco bracelet, lent by her mother for the evening. To satisfy her something blue: An aquamarine ring made in Paris in the 1930s, a wedding present from Teddy to his bride. In her hand was a dainty bouquet of lily of the valleys.
