The Grooms Wore Thom Browne for Their Wedding at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Writer and filmmaker Jacob Brown and painter Benjamin Curtin Staker met about eight years ago when Benji was singing backup vocals in a band. Jacob caught a show he played at the Boom Boom Room in New York City’s Meatpacking District. A couple of years later, they became friends while living in L.A. “We really hated living there,” Jacob admits. “I moved back to New York after nine months, and he soon followed. And we both ended up being single. Initially he was traveling a lot as a model, spending months at a time in Tokyo, Paris, or Guangzhou, but when he was in New York, we started hanging out a lot as friends.” They discovered all kinds of shared interests—obsessions over obscure books, artists, and aesthetics. “There was never that awkward dating or getting to know each other phase because we were already friends,” Jacob says. “So when we first kissed outside a West Village bar, the relationship already felt inevitable and comfortable and exciting and wonderful.”
An engagement came about very naturally. “We had already talked about it for some time,” Jacob says. “It felt really obvious and true.” Benji popped the question on Fire Island where the couple had been sharing a house every few weeks with their COVID pod. “We were on one of our long walks together, and he was acting all weird and wanted me to got to this one specific area that he had picked out in the dunes. Probably the best part was right afterwards, we came back to our house share for dinner with a lot of our friends, and got to tell them all at once—there was this amazing and immediate warm celebratory moment.”
The wedding was planned for August 16th at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “It’s an incredible, beautiful place that we love,” Jacob says. “We got engaged in September of 2020, but were sort of waiting to schedule the wedding until we were sure that our family would be able to attend. So we planned enough—and did it late enough—to not have to postpone.”
The goal was to create a wedding that felt simple but special—“like a really perfect day at the park with friends,” Jacob says. “Neither of us drink anymore, so we decided to make it a daytime affair, and to skip the seated dinner. And we kind of flipped the day around. So we had what you might call the reception first. Followed by the ceremony. Followed by what we thought would be a quick bite of cake but turned into two hours of cake, speeches, and dancing and hanging out. Thankfully the venue just let us run over cause it was a ton of fun.”
The two did everything together, for better or worse. “I think our moms—particularly Jacob’s—were getting very anxious because we really didn’t want to stress or rush, which meant a lot of things didn’t fall into place until the last week,” Benji says. “A week before the wedding, we still didn’t have an officiant, photographer, or string quartet. But our process worked really well for us.”
For the officiant, they knew they wanted someone traditional, but not religious. “We ended up googling ‘Lesbian Rabbi’ and came across Gail Nalven, who we could immediately tell from her voluminous scarves and silvery brooches, possessed the second-wave feminist mom vibes we wanted. She was amazing, and gave us a simple ceremony that followed the contours of a traditional Jewish ceremony without any mentions of god.”
For the photographer, the two knew they didn’t want a “wedding photographer.” “It just felt wrong,” Jacob explains. “We really wanted someone we had a personal connection to and who would know some of our friends and was queer.” At the last minute, Jacob reconnected with visual artist Charles Caesar, whom he had worked with on a few editorial projects, as well as a film, over the years. Charles has a really art-driven style and was able to not just bring an amazing aesthetic to the photos but really capture the emotion and energy of the day.
For the music, the couple ended up finding Art Strings Ensemble, led by Alex Abaev—who Jacob says “looked straight out of a Wes Anderson casting, gray hair and formal tuxes, etc., and who played in really immaculate classically trained style.”
The couple did their own planning, but they were grateful to accept help with execution as the date drew closer. William Gideon from the Botanic Garden’s in-house caterer organized the food and drink, realizing Jacob and Benji’s request for a menu that could be described as “Eccentric Tea Party In The Park.” Benji’s best friend Erica Rompani came from Italy two months early and took over all the planning, right up to the day of, carrying bushels of dried flowers to the venue.
The grooms both wore Thom Browne for their main looks. “We coordinated by wearing seersucker,” Jacob says. “Mine was a little more classic, gray stripes on white. Benji was a little more fun, going with jacket and shorts in patchwork seersucker and solid navy blocking, as well as shiny nautical brass buttons.” Jacob wore his with Givenchy lace-up derbies and a Fendi floral print shirt. Benji went with a Thom Browne shirt and a pair of Dries Van Noten lace-up derbies with a spiky platform sole.
