Designers Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre Held an Unconventional Wedding in the Belgian Countryside
For a designer duo on a mission to shake things up with their inclusive brand celebrating every woman, it only felt natural that their wedding would also break the norms. And Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre (who work together under Ester’s name) did just that when they tied the knot near Bioul, Belgium, on August 30.
The couple met in 2011, during their first year of studies at La Cambre, the prestigious visual-arts school in Brussels. Both studied graphic design before Ester shifted to fashion design, and they helped each other out on projects for a year before they took a stroll in the Forêt de Soigne near Brussels and kissed for the first time.
Fast-forward to October 2017: Ester had moved back to Brussels to live with Balthazar after working as a womenswear design assistant for Acne Studios in Paris. On a beautiful late-summer afternoon, she took Balthazar for a walk at the exact same place in the forest. She proposed to him, knee on the ground, her voice shaking and tears in her eyes from the emotion. “Just like the stereotype in the movie, except that roles were swapped—the girl proposed,” Ester says.
The two popped a bottle of Champagne before Balthazar called his parents. It turned out they already knew. Before proposing, Ester had asked his mother for his hand in marriage, as well as a family ring to propose. “Balthazar has the greatest respect for the couples formed by his grandparents and parents, so a ring representing these unions seemed to me to be the ideal object,” she says.
The newly engaged couple couldn’t have imagined that success would come knocking just as quickly—indeed, they were caught up in such a whirlwind that they almost forgot about the wedding entirely. First, they won the Galeries Lafayette prize at the Hyères festival in 2018, leading them to launch their fashion label in 2019 before being shortlisted for the LVMH Prize in 2020. In the years since, they have shown four collections at Paris Fashion Week, collaborated with the Danish label Ganni, and received the ANDAM special prize in July 2023.
Six years later, they were finally able to hold the wedding in the Ardennes, the Belgian village in which the groom grew up. They quickly found their dream venue in the clearing of a forest (featuring plenty of cows), but after discovering it was booked on weekends until 2025, they decided to go ahead and host it on a Wednesday in late August. “Let’s face it—the middle of the week after the summer break is a tricky date. We thought we would have cancellations, but everyone came,” says Ester. In Belgium, late August can also be tricky when it comes to the weather—and the inevitable happened, as it began to pour with rain in the morning. But the stars aligned, and 10 minutes before the guests arrived, the sun came out. “All that without a shaman!” says Ester, referring to the mega-brands known to hire shamans to ensure auspicious weather for their shows. Thirty or so guests wore Ester Manas dresses (including Ester’s and Balthazar’s mothers) and were rapidly dubbed the Manas girls. But with the brisk temperatures, Ester and Balthazar were quickly asked to start making outerwear. (It’s planned for the coming months.)
The couple also decided to forgo a wedding planner. “We naively thought that after staging Paris Fashion Week shows, it would be a piece of cake to organize a wedding,” says Ester. “But there’s an emotional, intimate, and unique dimension to a wedding that takes the planning to a whole new level.” For Ester and Balthazar, it was a no-brainer that they wanted to manage the wedding themselves. “With our brand, we have an extremely precise aesthetic vision, and in our personal lives, we take immense pleasure in entertaining and throwing dinner parties,” says Ester, noting that they spent a lot of time in flea markets hunting down the decorations and tableware for the big day: napkins, stainless-steel ice cream bowls, vases, tablecloths, and dishes. “Everything came from secondhand shops or were objects salvaged from our families.”
She adds: “The wedding was the perfect excuse to combine the passion of our private lives with our professional aesthetic vision. What’s more, we’re surrounded by talented craftsmen, artists, visual artists, sound engineers, technicians, writers, and so on. It was a fantastic opportunity to build this project with them.”
There’s certainly no lack of talent in their inner circle. Odile Gautreau, one of their favorite models and a multihyphenate, played a DJ set, while Belgian journalist Anne-Françoise Moyson was the emcee of the lay ceremony. Their regular backstage photographer, Nicolas Kuttler, took the photos, and for the glam, they relied on Guerlain makeup specialist Nakani Keita and Brussels-based hairstylist Mika Bassanelli. Meanwhile, Jeanne Viviès and Sonia Oet, who run a ceramics collective named Four, took care of the cocktail buffet. Their speciality? They cook according to the ceramic container they’ve created beforehand. (Or sometimes it’s the other way round: They create a ceramic object to suit the dish they want to cook.) Ester says: “I find this very connected to our vision of clothing that adapts to the body. The relationship between container and content is always very poetic. That’s what we try to do every day through our collections, so I love it when girls do it in the kitchen!”
The fashion industry was well represented too, including casting director William Lhoest, who is behind the inclusive casting of the Ester Manas and Marine Serre shows; Belgian stylist Benoit Bethume; accessories designer Marianna Ladreyt; muse Charline Mignot (a.k.a. the singer Vendredi sur mer), and Telly Jalily, Demna’s assistant at Balenciaga, who ended up catching the bridal bouquet.