The Bride Wore Alexander McQueen to Her Wedding in the English Wilderness
The hashtag #NoWomanNoRye set the stage for what was an unconventional English wedding weekend, filled to the brim with outdoor activities (think ax throwing, clay-pigeon shooting, and a hog roast) and tequila-fueled late-night dancing. “He’s Jewish, I’m Jamaican, we did our best [with the hashtag],” jokes TV writer Camilla Blackett, who also cohosts a podcast focused on beauty and wellness for women of color called Foxy Browns. In October of 2012 she and music touring agent Doug Singer were set up on a blind date by his oldest friend, Evan. Six years later Doug proposed—but there was no engagement ring.
“I don’t wear diamonds,” Camilla explains. “Especially after visiting a diamond mine in Sierra Leone for a movie and seeing how barbarically the workers are treated. So instead Doug gave me a Damien Hirst spot painting as my engagement ring.” He had conjured up an elaborate plan to set up the painting in the house and surprise her, but Camilla derailed everything when she refused to leave the house as planned and instead spent the morning relaxing on the sofa. “Eventually Doug snuck the painting out of the house and reappeared a couple of hours later,” she remembers. “He rang the doorbell and was there on one knee holding the painting and asked me to marry him.”
Doug’s work in the music industry means he and Camilla have logged many hours at music festivals over the years, and while they decidedly did not want a wedding with a festival theme, they did want a celebratory three-day event so that their guests could really get to know each other. So, at a luxe estate called Wilderness Reserve in Suffolk, they turned each of their locations into a stage of sorts, with different activities and hidden installations tucked away all over the 5,000-acre property.
There was clay-pigeon shooting, an Aperol bar, a hog roast, a natural-wine tasting, a Champagne wall, yoga in the sheep field, a hidden sunken swimming pool, and a flower-arranging class. There were classic cars to drive, a vintage sweet shop with a hidden bar behind it, and tennis tournaments. They even built a secret teepee village for kids and turned the Georgian mansion’s basement into a karaoke room. “We wanted you to be able to find something fun at all hours of the day, depending on your mood, jet lag, or hangover,” Camilla explains. Covered in wildflowers with sheep wandering about, Wilderness Reserve is the picture of pastoral beauty. Camilla, Doug, and their event planner, Charlotte Nichols, followed these aesthetic cues. “We wanted all decor to feel like it already belonged there,” the bride explains. “Even the woodland where we got married was a natural clearing—a bunch of trees had just naturally formed in an arch, creating this aisle in the middle of the forest.”
From the start Camilla knew she didn’t want to do a traditional bridal gown. “There’s something about the performative femininity when it comes to bridalwear that I find so uncomfortable,” she says. “And to be honest I wasn’t sure I was going to wear white.” Before she found her dress, she was planning on wearing a blood-red Dolce Gabbana dress. “But then Cardi B got into a fight with Nicki Minaj whilst wearing it, so there went that idea!” When she ultimately found a classic Alexander McQueen column dress with decadent hand-embroidered details, she knew it was right. “Strong, not demure,” she says of her sense of self in the dress. “Tall, not diminutive. Woman, not girl. And then it was 90% off and the last one in the world in my size, so that was that.”
