When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is “For it not to feel like a wedding!” The betrothed have never been less attached to the old wedding handbook — or the need to please their great-aunt. So in a flurry of pampas grass and perfectly mismatched-to-match bridesmaid dresses, how do you pull off a non-cookie-cutter affair? For the answers, we decided to interrogate the cool couples whose weddings we would actually want to steal, right down to the tiger-shaped cake toppers.
Here, we spoke with bridal content creator and stylist Kennedy Bingham and Gerson Galdamez, Ph.D., a gerontology expert and program officer at the Archstone Foundation. The couple, who are lifelong Angelenos (Bingham grew up in Claremont and Galdamez in Compton), first met in college and eloped in the fall of 2021. Since 2020, Bingham has built a sizable following as Gown Eyed Girl on Instagram and TikTok, where she aims to share boundary-pushing imagery and videos demonstrating what bridal means today. For her, at the pair’s wedding celebration this past August, it meant a marching band, teeny-tiny tacos, and aesthetic references to Gaudí, Studio Ghibli, and Cher.
Kennedy: We both went to USC, and my friend convinced me to join the rock-climbing team. At the meet and greet, I was sitting in the gym and staring at this climb, visualizing it, trying to figure out how I was going to get on it.
Gerson: Because I was the captain of the team, it was my job to make sure people felt welcome. I noticed this girl just staring at a climb, so I went over and she very adamantly said, “Yeah, I’m just trying to figure it out.”
Kennedy: I was like, “Yeah, give me a minute.” We went on our first date, and I told our group of friends, “I found my person. This is it for me.”
Gerson: We grew up together, which came with struggle for a good period of time.
Kennedy: When we first started dating, I was 19 and he was 20. We made a pact: “Okay, we are only going to [discuss] marriage for the first time when we’re 25. If we don’t want to do it at 25, we’ll talk again at 30. If we don’t want to at 30, then we’re never going to do it.”
Gerson: I went through grad school, where you don’t get paid anything and you’re working superlong hours, and at the same time, she was working in a job that wasn’t aligned with her passions.
Kennedy: I actually studied international relations in college and thought I would go into politics, but then Trump was elected. I pivoted to another passion, high luxury fashion, which is obviously a very exclusive field. A friend said, “If you want to get into luxury fashion and you didn’t go to fashion school, a great place to start is bridal.” I got a job at this start-up bridal shop and just fell in love. Then COVID hit, and I went from seeing seven brides a day to sitting in a showroom by myself. I made my first video, and it was so simple — just “Here’s five wedding dresses I think are cool,” and it blew up. I followed up with a video about jumpsuits, and people loved that even more. It just snowballed from there.
Gerson: Going through the grind together, it became apparent that the partnership we had built, through the hard moments and the joyful moments, was unique. To place a permanence on it felt of value to us, like it would add even more strength to what we had built.
Kennedy: When 25 rolled around, we sat down and had a conversation about what marriage meant to us. It ended up that we both felt it was a step we wanted to take.
Gerson: We eloped in November 2021. I had just graduated from USC with my doctorate, and Kennedy had embarked on this interesting new career. It made us feel like the time was right for us to make it legally official. And COVID was a factor; we didn’t want to wait until the complete end of the pandemic, which didn’t seem like it would be for a few years.
Kennedy: We didn’t want to stop planning, start planning, stop planning, start planning. Being in the industry, I saw how that back-and-forth really affected people.
Gerson: It was just me and Kennedy and our two closest friends going to Vegas and getting it done — no stress.
Kennedy: It was perfect. We loved it, but we also had a lot of family and friends who wanted us to have a wedding. We had a conversation with our parents basically saying, “We are going to move forward with this wedding, but it’s going to be on our terms. And it’s maybe going to look a little bit different than the traditional weddings you’ve been to.” We wanted it to be weirder.
Gerson: A major priority for us was to make sure Kennedy would be able to showcase her creative prowess as a stylist and her eye as a bridal-fashion professional. That was our North Star. It was an interesting undertaking.
Kennedy: We picked Rosewood Miramar Beach because the service was just outstanding. It was next level how detail oriented they were.
Gerson: It was the right size for the amount of people we wanted. There’s a train that runs through the property every 20 to 30 minutes, and we thought it would be charming to have it run by at some point in the ceremony. We share a passion for Studio Ghibli and specifically the film Spirited Away, where a train is a powerful motif. Also, there was a nice neutrality to the reception area that would allow us to transform the space.
Kennedy: I’m a big brown person; it’s my favorite color. The color palette was so fun because I wanted deep, moody colors: eggplant purple and plum tones with dark brown.
Gerson: Kennedy and I both have a distinct love of earthy tones, but we also have a love of whimsy. The dark reds and purples were contrasted with lighter elements, and the macro placement of them in the venue was really important.
Kennedy: I told our florist, Katie, at Going Steady Studios that I wanted big flowers with a lot of character. I wanted them to feel like they were overwhelming the space, especially on the lawn; I wanted it to feel like the flowers were growing onto the ceremony area, onto the chairs, onto us. My bouquet was these lady’s-slipper orchids; I’d never seen a flower like that. Katie had free rein to go weirder and weirder. Her mind is amazing.
Gerson: Our planner, Jove Meyer, had the hardest job of them all, which is to take the verbose and sometimes oxymoronic ramblings of two creative people and make it happen in real life — while contending with our families. There were the strong opinions from family and the idea that this is Kennedy’s professional magnum opus and the logistics of making all of this happen. I think he did a masterful job.
Kennedy: In the ballroom, the floors were gray carpet, which broke my heart. I hated that gray carpet so much, and I wanted wood floors. Jove made the great recommendation of [evoking] wood in the tables with beautiful custom tablecloths by BBJ La Tavola that were white on top and brown around the edges, so they gave that warm feeling. I wanted to play up this romantic feeling of being at a candlelight dinner with your friends and family — dreamlike. Mia Sylvia did such an amazing job with the drapery in the ballroom.
Gerson: The draping pieces were to transport people to a different modality or paradigm, to make them feel steeped in romance.
Kennedy: The wedding-dress hunt drove me absolutely nuts. My mom, who was a big part of the whole wedding, and I are on completely opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to everything fashion. She’s so picky, and everything she loved, I hated — and vice versa. I found a Jacquemus dress for $900 on the RealReal and bought it on a whim. Everyone loved it, but I ended up wanting something different for the ceremony, so I wore it for the rehearsal. During alterations, the seamstresses built out the petticoat underneath to emphasize the bottom and make it look almost jellyfish-y. It was the coolest dress.
Gerson: I wore a custom suit by Suitsupply. It was dark brown, a double-breasted coat with interesting buttons. We decided to go with ascots for the neckwear because we struggled for a year and a half with ties and bow ties, and none of it felt right. I had never worn an ascot before, and I don’t think any of my groomsmen had either, but it had this alignment with the broody-romance aesthetic.
Kennedy: The [ceremony] dress I ended up falling for was this gorgeous Cortana, a Spanish designer I’ve admired for years. I picked this big tulle gown with a netted overlay that gave it a ghostly, dreamy quality. You can’t get the full experience of the dress without touching the fabric; the only way I can describe it is it feels like you’re touching wet sand. It had such weight. I worked with Madison Chamberlain to make a custom veil in the same sandy color; it was asymmetrical with little frayed tears in it that made the veil look like it was moving even when I was standing still. I kept the asymmetry going with my earrings: a sculpted-heart stud, pearl stud, and gold hoop from Agmes in one ear and then a giant hanging drip pearl earring from Faris in the other.
Gerson: She kept the ceremony dress totally secret, but she did show me some of the other ones. I wasn’t tuned in to that conversation as much because that was her domain and I wanted to be surprised, especially for the ceremony.
Kennedy: We debated for a long time who would officiate, because they weren’t actually officially officiating anything since we were already married. So we wanted someone who could speak more to the poetic nature of love itself.
Gerson: Kennedy’s third-grade teacher officiated. Both of us are really relationship-driven; we tend to keep friends for a long time. Having someone who has known Kennedy since childhood embodied that characteristic of both of us.
Kennedy: I’m a big reader, my husband’s a big reader, and she was the person who got me into reading and so helped shape my understanding of what romance and love can be.
Gerson: We decided not to write out personalized vows because we had done that during our elopement. To re-create it felt disingenuous to the folks attending.
Kennedy: Instead, we shared a description of what we want our relationship to look like moving forward and then had my teacher do a reading of two of our favorite poems by Mary Oliver.
Gerson: “Wild Geese” and “Don’t Hesitate,” both of which have a sort of melancholy feel. They are two of my favorite poems of all time because of the balance they strike in describing beauty, loss, and hopefulness. When I look back at my relationship with Kennedy so far, there’s been a lot of beauty but also loss and grief we’ve helped each other through.
Kennedy: We actually didn’t speak the entire ceremony. Afterward, a few people said, “We were kind of disappointed you didn’t share vows.” But that was what we wanted: bringing our friends and family into a peek of our relationship but keeping those sentimental pieces between me and him.
Gerson: At cocktail hour, we had these tiny fish tacos on lime halves. It was about 70 percent lime and 30 percent taco, which I found amusing.
Kennedy: You could fit the tacos on a dime.
Gerson: There were also tiny margaritas. It’s always nice to have tiny stuff. We had a quartet playing throughout. There was an ice sculpture, that Kennedy’s mom insisted on having, of a giant clam.
Kennedy: We had a caviar bar nestled into this ice sculpture of a clam. We had a lot of sake out, because obviously I’m Asian and we had a lot of Asian guests. The only thing my mom, Gerson, and I could agree on is we wanted the food to be outstanding.
Gerson: Dinner was plated. I don’t think I had a single bite of any of it, but I heard it was really good. A nice risotto came out — looked great! I asked for bread because I’m a bread guy, so I had a giant basket next to me. I did have some of that, at least.
Kennedy: My second look, at the reception, was Sophie et Voilà, a strapless dress with an asymmetrical hemline and this beautiful top wrap. It was such a simple dress but so architectural. When I think about shapes, I think about Gaudí and other artists of his era. Then I love, love, love what Daniel Roseberry is doing with Schiaparelli, and it would be a dream to wear anything from his collections. I found that eye necklace, and it was so funky and weird, and I liked the tone of it — this almost faded, brassy gold. It worked well with the browns.
Gerson: The USC Trojan Marching Band did our entrance and then we had a DJ, Dani, for the rest. Our first dance was to “Time After Time” but by Margaret Whiting, not Cyndi Lauper.
Kennedy: It’s a beautiful song. We originally heard it at the end of Julie & Julia, which is one of my main comfort movies, when Julia Child and Paul Child are just sitting in their kitchen. They love each other so much.
Gerson: She wanted to do a lift at the end. I am not a dancer, and I was pretty nervous. We practiced at home, though we had to adapt on the day because she’s wearing different shoes; I’m wearing different shoes; she’s wearing a giant dress. But it panned out.
Kennedy: My last look was where “simple” just went out the window. I went to Wiederhoeft — I think Jackson is such a talented designer — and originally I thought I was going to go with a white crystal look with crystal leggings. But in the showroom, I tried on this corset and pants, and it was so killer. I thought the outfit was very Cher, so I was like, “Let’s lean Cher.” We pulled some inspiration from her orange outfits back in the day, especially the ones she had worn to the Met Gala, but the tone just made me look really orange. Randomly one day, Jackson was like, “I just redid my apartment and I have these curtains left over, and I think you’d like the color.” It was the beautiful plum you see in the photos, made out of their curtains. Then I needed to match the energy of the outfit, so my wonderful hair and makeup artist, Sparkle, made me a crazy weave-braided extension thing with chandelier crystals in it, which tied in with the gorgeous ballroom chandeliers.
Gerson: I didn’t expect her to go with something like that, but I thought it turned out wonderful. Late night, we had pretzels and pizza.
Kennedy: It was important to us to have food coming out at every point. With every new dish, there were signature cocktails. We had this Yakult-soju drink that I still think about to this day and espresso martinis with our dog’s face printed on them. The cake was an ordeal.
Gerson: My one thing that I was kind of a diva about was that I wanted to have strawberries in the cake. Just a vanilla cake with cut strawberries. For some reason, this was a problem.
Kennedy: My husband was so mellow through the whole planning process. He was like, “This is your rodeo. I’m so happy you’re going to have fun.” But the one thing he really wanted was vanilla cake with fresh-cut strawberries. Not strawberry compote or anything — it had to be fresh-cut, chunky strawberries. The venue said, “Sorry, we can’t do that. It’s going to compromise the integrity of the cake.”
Gerson: I was like, “The bakeries in Compton can do it. Please tell me this super-nice, expensive venue can make something happen.”
Kennedy: One of my mom’s good friends actually ended up gifting our wedding cake from a private studio, and there’s a photo of me and Gerson looking into the cake after it was cut and doing a big cheer because the fresh-cut strawberries had made it, and it was delicious.
Gerson: I had complained about it so much that everyone knew and was cheering with us.
Kennedy: There wasn’t an official after-party. Honestly, we don’t have a big dance-y crew. A lot of the memories I have with my friends are sitting around on the couch, laughing the night away, and that’s how it ended.
Gerson: We ordered $400 or $500 of Taco Bell to our hotel room and went to town with a handful of brave warriors who stayed the entire time.
Kennedy: We were eating Crunchwrap Supremes until three in the morning.
Gerson: I might’ve seen the sun coming up.
More From This Series
- A Weepy Wednesday Wedding in the Catskills
- A Rock-and-Roll Wedding in Asbury Park
- A Modern Muslim Wedding in the Heart of Hollywood
We’re working on a series about weddings, and we want your strong opinions! Please fill out this very quick survey about the aspects of weddings you wish would go away forever and the ones you love. Answers will be anonymous!