Simon Porte Jacquemus tied the knot with his longtime partner Marco Maestri in a beautiful wedding ceremony in the South of France this weekend. The nuptials were documented on the French designer’s Instagram account, where he highlighted every thoughtful detail that was put into his special day— from the sunset dinner on the road leading to his childhood home in Salon-de-Provence and the giant, custom-designed cake featuring him and his partner as toppers to the cigars served on trays and the 100 wedding dresses designed for his guests (including Dua Lipa and Amina Muaddi).
Now, I’m not a person who cares about weddings (let alone celebrity weddings) by any means, so I was surprised when I found myself obsessively poring over the videos and photos that emerged from Jacquemus’s nuptials. For the first time in my adult life, I actually felt the desire to have a wedding.
The truth is, I always believed that weddings were a massive waste of time and money. A grand show of excess and wastefulness intended to impress extended family and family friends you don’t even know on a first-name basis, if you will. I’d rather spend the $50,000-or-whatever to travel the world with my future husband than feed a bunch of strangers who will go home and gossip about the event later, I told myself. Plus, who wants the stress of planning a wedding?
In 2020 and 2021, more people scaled back on weddings due to COVID-19, so I am not alone in my thinking. But that doesn’t stop people, like my mom for instance, from telling me “I’m crazy,” whenever I mentioned my choice to diverge from tradition in my decision to simply go to the courthouse and sign a piece of paper in lieu of having a wedding.
So, what was it about Jacquemus and Maestri’s big day that flipped a switch in my brain and made me change my stance on weddings so fast? Sure, the wedding was irrefutably dreamy with a painstaking attention-to-detail that only someone like Jacquemus could pull off. Every aspect of the nuptials was highly-Instagramable, from the vintage, cream convertible the newlyweds drove off in to the beige, cloth napkins embroidered with the couple’s initials.
And though the nuptials were, for the lack of better words, aesthetically-pleasing, it wasn’t what ultimately convinced me that maybe I do want to have a wedding after all.
As I sat on my bed scrolling through Jacquemus’s Instagram Story, I was able to feel the love radiating from my iPhone screen, even from thousands of miles away. It was present from the minute the nuptials started and the designer emerged at Charleval, in the Bouches-du-Rhone’s town hall, arm-in-arm with his grandmother to the couple dancing until sunrise to hits from Shania Twain and Nancy Ajram surrounded by friends who flew in from all corners of the globe to rejoice the newlyweds. For the first time, I no longer viewed weddings as a giant waste of time and money, but the celebration of pure, unfiltered love between two people.
