This Couture Bride’s Custom Gown Featured Hundreds of Mother-of-Pearl Buttons Belonging to Her Grandmother and Parents
As a creative consultant for the likes of Harrods, Shiseido, Omorovicza, Christian Louboutin, and De Beers, Iona Judd is, in the crudest terms, paid for having vision, taste, and style. And so, when it came to planning her own wedding earlier this spring—arguably her highest-stakes gig to date—all the deliverables, from designing a logo, to custom-building a DJ booth, had to be executed to the same assiduously honed standards. “There were points when my fiancé was like, ‘What are you doing? This isn’t a client project!’, and I was like, ‘We are the clients!’,” she says. “Everyone thought I’d be a bit of a bridezilla, but I was actually so chilled. I mean, it was the most fun brief I’ve ever worked on.”
Judd technically met her now-husband, Elliot Mason, while on a girls trip to Ibiza, the summer before sitting her A-Levels. “It was a hedonistic weekend,” she says. “And I can barely remember it, if I’m honest, let alone meeting him.” Fast forward seven years, and Judd, then a 24-year-old Central Saint Martins jewelry design graduate, happened to match with the same Elliot on Bumble. “I discovered that we had lots of mutual friends, and over the course of our first date at Bar Termini, was informed that we had not only met at several of their parties, but even had full-on conversations, which, again, I couldn’t quite recall.” Judd scuttled home, a little mortified, while Mason required gentle persuading to go on a second outing. “Who would ever have thought we’d be getting married all these years later?”
The engagement took place on a wet and wild stretch of coastline famed for having been the place where 68 Celtic Christian monks were slaughtered in 806AD on the remote isle of Iona—Judd’s namesake—in the Inner Hebrides. “It was pissing it down, both of us were in waterproofs, and I basically demanded that Elliot take a photo of me, Iona, on Iona,” Judd recalls. “As I jumped up and down, he sort of murmured something to me, and so I turned around and he was on one knee.” She, of course, said yes. “I think my soul left my body for about 15 seconds. It was just the most surreal, magical thing.” The wedding, she hoped, would take place beneath the sunnier skies of the Peloponnese, but the gods had other plans. “We went on a recce to Kardamyli, and found an abandoned amphitheater overlooking the ocean,” she adds. “It was beautiful, but the village elders vetoed the idea, essentially.”
The mission, then, was to bring the spirit of Greece to Judd’s hometown in rural Suffolk. Big sprays of cornflower brought to life the brilliant blues of the Aegean Sea during the couple’s church service, while the ruins of Sir John Soane’s neighboring Tendring Hall—the portico of which was modeled on the Parthenon—backdropped their reception, where bearded irises evoked the dusky purples and flaming oranges of an epic sunset. Elsewhere, a bespoke DJ booth rose in the shape of an Ionic column, while Minoan squid motifs—a nod to the long-limbed couple’s nickname, “the squids”—appeared on invitations, the order of service and even a flag flown above the church. Instead of a traditional wedding cake, guests were served tiramisu topped with chocolate plaques resembling marble friezes.
The fashion was just as intentional. “I originally wanted to have, like, 15 dresses, including a micro mini with a huge, billowing cape,” she says. “But my mum was like, ‘You just cannot wear that in a church.’” Judd consulted close friend Isabel Bonner—a stylist for whom she was bridesmaid in 2022—and demi-couturier Ellie Misner to refine her editorial ambitions. Their moodboard included images of Pearly Kings and Queens (a tribute to Judd’s Mile End roots) with references to early Margiela, Gaultier and McQueen. The result? A shimmering mother-of-pearl bodice—hand-embroidered with hundreds of second-hand buttons from her late grandmother’s collection and parents’ clothes, alongside a pendant cross once worn by a friend’s mother—with an earthy raw wool skirt. “It carried all the spirits of people who were, and are, so precious to me.”
It took her sister 45 minutes to lace Judd into the dress, but by the time she said “I do,” two diamond bands, sourced vintage from Piccadilly Vaults, clasped around a bouquet of milk-white irises grown in her mother’s allotment, “I felt like a princess.” A choir serenaded the bride and groom—who runs a tailoring business with his father, and wore a bespoke Anthony Sinclair morning suit—with an arrangement of Oasis’s “Acquiesce,” as they made their way to the reception in an Aston Martin DB5. The car had a couple of false starts. Then along came a Greek-inspired feast, speeches, and the requisite outfit change into a mohair Éliane Vergès shorts set (Judd got her micro moment in the end) with a Watteau-backed Henrietta Faire cape. “It was very Saint Laurent-inspired,” she says. “I felt like a diva.”
The newlyweds shared their first dance to N-Trance’s “Set U Free,” before guests—each interpreting Judd’s “imagine it’s the Met Gala, without it being the Met Gala” dress code—joined them beneath 250 handmade foil stars suspended from the marquee ceiling. “I didn’t leave the dance floor for four hours,” she says. “I literally had to be dragged off Elliot’s shoulders.” The evening’s Dionysian revelry burned through an entire canister of liquid smoke—enough, typically, to last a three-day festival—before giving way to a more wholesome affair the next morning: a sports day dubbed, “The Squid Games.”
“I wish I could do it all over again. In fact, I wish I could go again, as a guest,” she concludes, with a laugh. “How soon is too soon to renew the vows?”
Photo: Charlotte Macke1/57I collect antique kimonos, and this one—from the 1940s, embroidered with dancing dragons—is one of my most treasured.
Photo: Alli.Studio2/57
