This Vogue Editor Bride Wore Custom Emilia Wickstead for Her Brooklyn Waterfront Wedding
By Willow Lindley’s own admission, she and her fiancé Eric Reeves had a “failure to launch” when it came to planning their wedding. After they got engaged in 2019—Eric hid a diamond ring in a tin of Willow’s favorite loose-leaf tea—they were immediately bombarded with questions about the when and where they were getting married. But a year quickly turned into two, and two turned into three. They still didn’t have any answers. By year four, even the nosiest aunt left them alone. “Our friends and family had completely given up on asking us when we were planning to finally get married,” Willow says, laughing. “We’re both quite private people and neither of us loved the idea of being the center of attention.”
That all changed on Valentine’s Day in 2024. Willow, the fashion market and collaborations director at Vogue, was seated between Vogue events consultant Eaddy Kiernan Bunzel and Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle at the Thom Browne show. They wouldn’t take her evasive “one day!” as an answer. “They really lit a fire under me about getting married!” Willow says. “Eaddy then proceeded to follow up with me almost daily until I started to really think about what we were going to do.” (After all, as one of the masterminds behind the Met Gala, Eaddy is a person who gets things done.)
The idea came to Willow one April day on the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan. While at the Dumbo stop, she saw the River Café—the storied Michelin-starred restaurant in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Within hours, Eaddy had made contact with its onsite events planner. They only had one weekend date available, August 9—which happened to be the day before Willow and Eric’s 10-year anniversary. “It all felt like kismet after so long,” Willow says.
With only four months between then and August, the wedding planning process was fast and furious. Willow asked Raúl Àvila, whom she frequently works with at Vogue, to do the decor. Eaddy, meanwhile, stepped in to coordinate with the River Café. The save-the-dates went out the night before the Met Gala. “I think a couple of my friends thought I was having a nervous breakdown,” she says.
Then, there was the dress. “You’d think a fashion editor would know exactly what to wear to her wedding. False!” She says, laughing. Eventually, she asked British designer Emilia Wickstead if she could remake a dress that originally debuted in her Spring 2023 collection, but in white. She agreed—and even added a cape. “She had the dress ready in three weeks,” Willow says. “She’s truly a miracle worker.”
Wickstead still had one more miracle to perform. A week before the wedding, DHL lost Willow’s wedding dress somewhere in Leicester, England. Her team worked tirelessly to track it down—and, at one point, even began making her an entirely new dress. At the last possible moment, they got the call: DHL had found the package. Emilia, who had a trunk show in the Hamptons the same week as Willow’s wedding, personally delivered the dress to the bride in New York City two days before she was set to walk down the aisle. (“Oh, my God,” Emilia says about the ordeal, laughing. “Willow was the most relaxed bride I’ve ever possibly met in my life!”)
The dress required a few last-minute alterations. So Willow called Cha Cha Zutic, the beloved dressmaker and seamstress who often works on Vogue shoots. She made the final tweaks overnight. “One of my favorite pictures from the wedding is of me and Cha Cha hugging as she zipped up the dress and it fit perfectly—at 3:30 p.m. before the 5:30 pm ceremony,” Willow says.
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