A Colorful New Orleans Wedding at Hotel Peter and Paul with a Hand-Dyed Pink Wedding Dress

The wedding dress of Emily’s dreams didn’t exist, so she found the closest thing and had it dyed hot pink. Then she dyed the veil to match, twice, because the first pink was wrong.

That kind of follow-through runs through every corner of this New Orleans wedding at Hotel Peter and Paul. Emily, a marketing manager with a graphic design degree, planned and designed the whole day herself, from a 20-color palette she named Bubblegum Funk down to the table numbers, with Hallowed Ground Productions coming in for month-of coordination so she could actually be a guest at the wedding she built. Bryan, a UX designer, wore an olive green suit cut for him in Bangkok. Nellie Bradford photographed all of it on digital and on film, and calls it one of her all-time favorite weddings to shoot.

Bubblegum Funk

Emily started with color, and then everything got designed against it: the invitation suite, the welcome bags, the wedding party attire. She took Hotel Peter and Paul’s signature checker pattern and redrew it in her own palette, and Noona, their dog, got a card of her own. “My degree is in graphic design, so I found it super fun to design it all!” The suite was printed at Global Printing Solution in Austin.

Twenty colors sounds like a lot, and it is! Her secret? No single card has to carry the whole palette. Each card takes two or three shades and lets the rest of the suite pick up the others. So you get a red gingham envelope, a light blue invitation, and a sunny yellow itinerary card, and somehow it all feels like one happy collection. I love when a bride knows exactly when to hold back.

The Pink Dress

“I always knew a white dress wasn’t for me,” Emily says. “I never felt like myself in white, nor did it make me feel special, and I couldn’t ignore what the tradition actually stems from, or what it still implies today.” Her idea of what reads as bridal, though, is old school: 1950s and 60s Dior, full skirts, structured bodices, timeless silhouettes. Nothing colorful in her budget looked like that. “Some screamed PROM, some were super fun, but none felt like a BRIDE to me.”

So she flipped the search. Instead of hunting for a colorful dress that felt bridal, she would find a bridal dress and give it color. She found Marisela of Alteria, a professional dyer who would take on wedding gowns when most studios wouldn’t, and Marisela walked her through which fabrics take dye, what to avoid, and what it would cost, narrowing the field to four gowns. A Pantone color chart settled the rest. Emily had told herself she was open to red, blue, green, or pink; one look at the sheet and it had to be pink. She Photoshopped her finalists in the shade before committing, and the winner was a Jenny Yoo floral jacquard ballgown from Unbridaled Austin, off the shoulder with a full skirt that does the Dior thing she wanted. “It made the maximalist in me happy while also still making me feel like a bride.”

The Harriet Falvey veil she dyed herself at home, and the first pass came out the wrong pink, so she did it again. Her Kate Spade New York shoes went emerald-teal to match Bryan’s tie, and emerald earrings matched his suit, so a hot pink bride and an olive green groom still look like a matched set.

Bryan’s suit had the longer commute. The two of them had met the team at Reign Custom Tailors on a trip to Thailand and came home with affordable custom suits, so when Reign announced a US trunk-show tour the year they got engaged, they pounced. Bryan chose everything: the olive green, the cloth, the buttons, and once the tour wrapped, the suit was cut back in Bangkok and shipped over about a month later. Emily then picked the pale blue shirt, the teal polka-dot tie, the pocket square, and the brooch to pull him into Bubblegum Funk.

Olive green and hot pink is a bold combo, and in the wrong hands it can feel a little costume-y. Here it just works. Both colors are rich and saturated, and neither fabric is shiny, so the dress and Bryan’s suit hold their own side by side. It feels like fashion, not like a bride standing in front of a backdrop.

Twenty Friends and One Lockdown

They both moved to Austin within a week of each other, Bryan from Long Island and Emily from central Illinois, and didn’t meet for another year, at Austin City Limits, when Emily was working her way into a 20-person friend group Bryan had just joined. She doesn’t remember meeting him. He remembers it, “not because he was into me but because I was going a little too wild at the festival haha.” She always thought he was cute. He had never dated anyone. Neither of them wanted to rock the friendship boat, and then right before the 2020 lockdown, Emily got free tickets to a show and asked the group who wanted to be her date. Bryan said yes. The show never happened. The texting did: “Everyday basically 24/7 for 3 months.” Not even very flirty, because they were both afraid of wrecking what they had. By the time their friends threw the first house party after lockdown, she knew. “One kiss and then we started dating :)”

It was Nellie’s first time shooting at Hotel Peter and Paul. “I instantly fell in love, it was a photographer’s playground,” says photographer Nellie Bradford. “So many colors and corners to create in!”

The Wedding Party

Emily and Bryan flew all the groomsmen to that same Reign trunk show for bespoke suits of their own, in navy and teal, with the ties picking up coral, yellow, pink, and maroon. Emily personal-shopped every bridesmaid’s dress herself from the Bubblegum Funk palette, so nobody matches and everybody belongs.

A Ten-Minute Ceremony

The ceremony ran about 10 minutes, and that was the plan. “For us, it wasn’t so much about us as it was about being with all our favorite people all in one spot,” Emily says. “So we had a very short ceremony, like 10 minutes, and then we threw an amazing party.” Their friend Hailey Loomis officiated in the hotel’s church.

Their processional came in two halves, one song for the wedding party and a second for Emily’s walk, and the recessional pushed the whole room straight toward the party.

Cocktail Hour

The two of them slipped off first, a table of small plates and one lamp between them, before rejoining everyone. Outside, Bacchanal Catering built a two-tier grazing table in the courtyard, the kind of spread that means nobody stands in a line for a plate. Emily and Bryan threw the wedding they wanted and, by Emily’s own account, didn’t let anyone else have much input, but when it came to their guests, they went all out.

Nellie also set up a guest portrait station during cocktail hour, against a backdrop matched to Emily’s design with florals from Goldie’s, and nearly every guest sat for one. That kind of turnout says a lot about her, and Emily put it best: “Nellie didn’t just show up to take pictures; she became part of our celebration. She talked with our guests, remembered their names, and somehow made everyone feel comfortable in front of the camera.” Their guests still bring her up.

The Reception

The church flipped for dinner during cocktail hour and came back in burgundy: long tables, olive satin napkins, amber uplighting on the peeling ochre columns. Emily designed the table numbers as small arched stained-glass windows in her palette, so every table holds a miniature of the building it sits in. Goldie’s broke the florals into bud vases scattered down the length of each table instead of massing them into centerpieces, so every guest had a different flower in front of them, and every one of those flowers had a name attached.

Those names belonged to the grandparents Emily and Bryan have lost, each one given a bloom of their own so the people missing from the day were still part of it. “The Secret Language of Our Flowers” sat on every table to tell you who was who: a book Emily made that matches each flower to the grandparent it stands for, gives the flower’s meaning and why it fit that person, and prints their wedding-day photos alongside. The back pages hold both sets of parents’ weddings. By the end of the night, every parent, aunt, and uncle had taken one home.

Then the dome above the dance floor lit up with a wedding from 1957. Bryan’s paternal grandparents’ film went first, footage his family had somehow kept for nearly 70 years, and both of those grandparents were in the room to see it, which Emily and Bryan had managed to keep a complete surprise. Emily’s parents’ 1985 wedding followed, with her grandpa and great aunt in it, both of whom had passed just a few months before. Then Bryan’s parents in 1988. The 80s reels were full of dancing, so for the rest of the night two more generations danced behind Emily and Bryan while they danced.

River City Hit Squad, an eight-piece band, held the stage under those projections all night, and for a lot of the room it was a first. “So many of our guests had never gotten to experience a band at a wedding,” Emily says. “I think of it as a very New Orleans thing to have a band instead of a DJ, and our guests agreed!”

The Second Line

The usual move is to second line during cocktail hour, in daylight, while the venue flips. Emily and Bryan saved theirs for the very end, a brass band leading the whole party from the hotel to the late-night bars. “We knew that it would be a way more fun experience after the party had gotten going, which meant we sacrificed beautifully lit photos of it but this way was more fun.” Their guests have since told them it was their favorite part of the night. “So yeah, basically our wedding was for our people,” Emily says. “The rest of our marriage will be for us.”

Emily planned and designed every bit of this herself, and her advice starts with all the weddings she and Bryan sat through before their own.

Congratulations, Emily and Bryan! All the best from GWS.