This Designer Bride Made All Her Own Dresses – And Her Handbag! – For Her Palermo Wedding

Reported by Vogue.

When your résumé includes McQueen, Celine, and a stint at US Vogue — and you co-founded one of London's most-talked-about handbag brands — outsourcing your wedding dress to someone else was never really an option. Georgie Wright, the designer behind cult bag label The Veil, married Charles Forte — vice president of development at Rocco Forte Hotels — in Palermo this year, and she made virtually everything herself: multiple gowns, a bespoke bridal bag, bridesmaid dresses, and looks for the children. According to Vogue, even the slip she wore when her feet finally gave out after 24 hours in Manolo Blahnik and Aquazzura heels got the Wright treatment — original straps swapped for hand-beaded ones.

The hero gown was four months in the making. Obsessed since childhood with Audrey Hepburn's Ascot dress in My Fair Lady, Wright fused that reference with a Forte family heirloom veil — photocopying its floral embroidery, recreating the pattern by hand, scanning it onto dress panels, then flying back and forth to The Veil's factory in India to perfect the micro-beadwork. "Even the type of thread could have changed the entire look," she said. The finished gown was scattered with miniature pearls, glass, and ivory beads cut to read like small diamonds, with 1920s tassels that mirrored The Veil's signature Melt bag — which Wright also recreated in custom ivory as a warm-up for an official bridal collection. A friendship with opera coat maker Viktor Gichev, discovered through stylist Alexandra Cronan, is already rumored to become The Veil's first collaboration.

The Venue Was Just as Considered

The setting required zero deliberation. Charles's father, hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, founded the family-owned group behind Villa Igiea, a landmark Palermo property where Charles himself lived during its 2021 reopening. The couple took over the entire hotel and held their ceremony at the Cattedrale di Monreale, a Byzantine marvel lined with shimmering gold glass mosaics. "As soon as we walked in, we knew, 'This is it,'" Wright said. Dinner followed in the adjacent Benedictine Cloister — one of Sicily's most significant medieval sites — secured with the help of Lady Aliai Forte. Tables were draped in green foliage with flecks of white flowers and hundreds of candles; the second evening leaned into the villa's original frescoes, the tables filled with poppies and irises.

The party had layers. Celebrity bridesmaid and The Veil co-founder Adwoa Aboah refused to let the bride change out of her gown, leaving Wright to dance cathedral-length veil in arm. A pink nightclub, a martini station lined with lemon trees, and a set that ended with every guest singing Oasis rounded out the night. The culinary headline: chef Fulvio Pierangelini — who normally caps his legendary ravioli service at 30 guests — made 3,200 portions on the day for a crowd of 300. A three-tiered pavlova dotted with wild strawberries nodded to Wright's New Zealand roots.

When the designer is also the bride, the wedding becomes the collection — and Wright's Palermo weekend made a very convincing case that the most powerful thing a creative woman can wear is her own work.

Read the original at Vogue.