A Cloud Dancer White Cocktail Tent That Opened Into Full Color: The 2026 Telfair Ball

The first room at the 2026 Telfair Ball had no color in it at all. Not the flowers, not the chairs, not the bar. Then a curtain, and a second tent where a Savannah artist’s hand-painted pattern ran across the ceiling, down the tablecloths, and onto every menu card.

Legacy in Motion was the theme, and planner and designer Tara Skinner Events built the night as two museums under two tents at The Park at Eastern Wharf in Savannah, Georgia. The cocktail tent stood in for the Jepson Center, clean and contemporary. The dinner tent stood in for the Telfair Academy, warm and layered. Hunter Hennes photographed it, The Summer Films filmed it, and August Design did the flowers in both rooms, which is a harder brief than it sounds when one room allows exactly one color and the other allows all of them.

It is a gala, not a wedding, and every idea in it travels to one. A monochrome cocktail hour that breaks into color at dinner is a move any tented celebration can borrow whole, and the black tie dressing at this party is the guest attire inspiration to save before your next formal invitation lands.

The Paper Suite

Lollipop Letterpress printed the suite and Ashley Curry Calligraphy lettered it: lavender, olive, and pink envelopes, a lemon-tree liner, gold script on the invitation. The menus are oval and die-cut, and each one arrives with a paper doll, a figure in a tuxedo or an orange ball gown, plus a tiny watercolor of a yellow neoclassical building. Paper dolls on a menu card is the detail guests slip into a clutch at the end of the night. :)

The White Room

Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year is Cloud Dancer, a soft, luminous white, and most of the ways it has shown up this year is as an accent. Tara Skinner Events used it for the whole room. LIT Charleston draped the tent in sheer white, Courtland & Co. handcrafted the 6.5-foot vessels that flank the entrance, and August Design filled them with white blossom and baby’s breath. Ghost chairs, a white floor, a white bar. The rentals came from Amazing Event Rentals and Curated Events.

White-on-white is a texture exercise. With no color to lean on, the eye reads shape instead: the pinched waist of the vessel, the sheer swag against the tent seam, loose blossom against the tight mound of baby’s breath. Tara Skinner Events built this room in silhouettes.

Overhead, custom clouds by Floatie Kings, oversized white balloons packed so densely the ceiling reads as weather. They are the theme made literal. “Just as clouds are constantly evolving, the Jepson Center continually introduces visitors to groundbreaking exhibitions, contemporary artists, fashion, and interactive experiences,” says the team at Tara Skinner Events of why this room got the sky. White lounge sofas and low drum tables sit between the vessels for cocktail hour seating.

August Design’s cherry blossom branches are the one thing in the room allowed to be untidy. Everything else is built to a line; the branches fan out past the width of the vessel with their small green leaves still on, and that green is the only color in the tent.

The bar and back bar are veined marble with two arched niches, and the bottles are left to be whatever color they are. A round matte vase of blossom cascades off the counter, and a row of small sweets in coral and green lines the edge.

Then, Color

The dinner tent is the Telfair Academy: rich, traditional, full of pattern. Bob Christian, a nationally recognized artist and Savannah native, painted the original botanical design that runs through the whole room. It lines the ceiling in cream. It covers the tables in dark green on white. It is on the napkins and in the paper suite. Courtland & Co. handled the custom linens and paper styling, BBJ La Tavola supplied the linens, and the rest of the room answers the print in chartreuse: green chiavari chairs, square chartreuse lanterns glowing overhead, lavender uplight at the far wall.

At the center, a 96-foot estate table. Long tables have been creeping into weddings for a few seasons now, and this is the case for going all the way: one table, one continuous runner of coral, peach, and orange garden roses, ranunculus, and tulips from August Design, candles in glass down the entire length.

Each place gets its oval menu card and paper doll, lettered by Ashley Curry Calligraphy and propped against a silver julep cup, with the Cru Catering courses in script. Scallop-edged plates, a small embroidered floral on the napkin, table numbers in green script. The round tables sit on flat periwinkle linen, which is the designer’s restraint showing: the Bob Christian print lives on the estate table and the ceiling, and the periwinkle gives the eye somewhere to rest.

The Black Tie Inspo

Black tie is the dress code guests dread most and the one with the most room in it. A blush gown with a white palm-frond overlay, zigzag bands of hot pink and gold sequins at the hem, a fluffy white wrap thrown over the top, and gold heels. Beside it, floor-length dark green printed with oversized pink tropical flowers. Neither is the safe black tie choice, and both are exactly right for a room lined in botanical print.

Mustard yellow with feathered cuffs, and a green-and-blue tropical-print caftan finished with a multicolor jeweled statement necklace and a bright orange clutch. The caftan is the one to study. Floor-length, printed, zero structure, and it reads as black tie entirely because of the necklace. That is the trick with an unstructured dress code: the jewelry does the formal work.

A textbook tuxedo, satin peak lapels and a white satin bow tie, and pinned to the lapel a gold frog brooch with green stones. Anyone dressing a groom or a groomsman who thinks black tie leaves no room for personality: this is the room.

The lapel brooch is quietly taking over from the boutonniere in menswear, and a black tie gala is where you see it first. A pin holds up all night, it can be an heirloom, and it gives an otherwise textbook tuxedo one thing to look at. How to carry it onto a wedding day, from a single statement piece to a vintage cluster running down the tie, in the brooch is the new boutonniere.

Four gowns, four answers to the same dress code, and not one of them black. A champagne-gold sequin column with cap sleeves. Silver-gray printed with hot pink fan shapes and a mustard tulle ruffle at the hem. Long-sleeve orange in a brown-orange botanical. A fuchsia ruffled bodice that tiers down into tulle, fading to dusty mauve at the floor.

Shop These Fun Black Tie Picks

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The night ends where it began, at the white tent, now glowing from the inside with the party in silhouette and the vessels uplit at the door. In black and white, it is finally as monochrome as it looked in daylight.

Cheers to Telfair Museums and to Tara Skinner Events for making a Pantone color into a room you could walk into!