A “Ski Bride” Gown Was the First Look at This Winter Wedding in Aspen
A blind date brought Etta Meyer and Ian McLendon together. “I was still the photo director of a magazine in New York,” explains Etta, now the editor in chief of Aspen Peak magazine. “I was contemplating my move out West, where my family is from. On a visit to Aspen over the Fourth of July, a friend suggested I meet Ian under the pretense that he would give me the lowdown on life in Aspen. She described him as a ‘a mountain man who knows what to order in a French restaurant.’ We met upstairs at Casa Tua. I can clearly remember him bounding up to me, and what he was wearing.” They had dinner on the deck and watched the fireworks over Aspen Mountain.
While that all sounds wildly romantic, the longer version of the story includes the fact that Etta had been in a car accident the night before, and as a result arrived at the dinner feeling completely frazzled. “Me driving a rental car, in the dark, in the backcountry with no cell service turned out to be a bad combination, and after taking a wrong turn, I drove the car off a small cliff and totaled it,” she remembers. An avid big game hunter, Ian knew the wilderness around Aspen intimately, so the next day he went looking for the car. He didn’t find it, but sent Etta a video of a bear prowling the area where the accident had happened. “Poor driving skills aside, he was apparently impressed that I had gotten myself out of the woods in one piece!” Etta jokes.
Etta moved to Aspen six months later, and she and Ian became friends. A few months after that, they started dating. Three years passed, and he proposed on New Year’s Day.
They’d been out skiing together, and when they got home Ian suggested they take the Snowcat and drive up the back side of Aspen Mountain to catch the sunset. It was freezing when they got there, so he built a fire. “He had collected the kindling, and asked me to help him start it by handing me a lighter,” Etta remembers. “It was a beautiful wooden box that was shaped a bit like a Zippo lighter. Ian is a gear nut, and I chuckled thinking how fitting it was that he owned some kind of bespoke hunting lighter. I handed the box back to him, saying I didn’t want to get sparks on my ski clothes—yes, I really said that!”
Ian insisted. “Etta, you need to learn how to light a fire!” he said. “This is a life skill—no, this is a survival skill! Open the box.”
“I opened it and no flame appeared, but there was something very sparkly inside,” Etta recalls. Then Ian was on his knees as the sun was setting, and she realized the box held a diamond ring.
When they got home, they called Etta’s parents. “I was actually leaving on a fishing trip the next day to Argentina with my mom and aunt for 10 days,” Etta says. “Mom was so relieved as Ian had asked my parents for permission before swearing them to secrecy. She was terrified he wouldn’t get around to it before the trip, and she’d be stuck with me for 10 days, all the while keeping the secret!”
The bride knew right away that she wanted to have the wedding at her church in Aspen, with the reception at Casa Tua. “Casa Tua is where we first met, and is owned by Ian’s good friends Miky and Leticia Grendene, who are incredible hosts. Being at their restaurant feels like being in a home,” Etta says.
Ian was once a competitive ski racer, and skiing is a big part of the couple’s lives, so they thought a winter wedding was the way to go. “The Christmas element was inspired by my oldest sister’s December wedding that happened when I was a little girl,” Etta says. “The town of Aspen gets totally decked out for the holidays with lights and decorations, and it’s also when my family used to visit our grandparents when they were alive and lived in Aspen in the winter.” Elizabeth Slossberg of EKS Events spearheaded the planning process, and Etta also tapped her brother, of Meyer Meyer, to create the wedding website, invitations, and menus, among other special details.
After the engagement, Etta visited Ian’s old friends Lee Keating and Tom Bowers at their shop, Performance Ski. “In addition to running the coolest skiwear shop, several years ago Lee resurrected a vintage Swiss skiwear brand called Authier,” Etta explains. “She immediately suggested creating a custom Authier ski bride gown for me. She had an image in her head right away—the only challenge was figuring out how to create a skirt with appropriate drama that I would be able to ski in without tripping and breaking a leg. In the end, she decided to create a bustle system that worked perfectly. The look was a white, cropped jacket with an exaggerated fur hood, worn over a pair of white stretch pants. The skirt pulled over the pants and tied with a bow at the waist. It was made from the same waterproof material as the jacket and looked like a real gown!”
