Hayley Paige Designed 17 Gowns for Her Own Wedding and Wore 11 of Them

Hayley Paige designed 17 gowns for her own wedding weekend and wore 11 of them. One change happened in the middle of the ceremony. And the gown she finally walked down the aisle in was not the one she had spent six months planning to wear.

After a seven-year engagement, the bridal designer married Conrad Louis Clevlen on September 5 at The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa in Riverside, California, with 150 guests and a three-day weekend built around the day itself: a welcome cocktail party they called the prelude, the wedding on Saturday, and a farewell brunch they called the encore. SAMKOMA planned and designed the whole thing, and CHARD photographed it. We love the way Hayley described the weekend: “Experiential sentimentalism with a little sartorial fun. I wanted everything beautiful to mean something, but that meaning has a sense of humor and loves fabulous dresses.”

Hayley + Conrad met in New York in 2018 through a mutual friend, Hattie, who told each of them, very casually, that she was having people over. When they arrived, it was just the two of them. “There were technically four guests if you count the dogs,” Hayley says. Within half an hour they were talking about music, then playing songs for each other, and when Huey Lewis and the News came on they ended up holding hands. “Neither of us moved for a while, and eight years later we still cannot agree on who started it.”

Conrad proposed on July 26, 2019, on a weekend in St. John, with both families there as the surprise. Seven years later, here they are. “After being engaged for seven years, the overwhelming feeling has been gratitude,” Hayley says. “We waited a long time for this chapter, so even in the stressful moments, I kept thinking, How excited and blessed are we?”

Seventeen Gowns for One Weekend

“In perhaps the least surprising development of the entire wedding: I went with Hayley Paige for Hayley Paige.” All 11 looks were custom Hayley Paige, and the racks in her suite held six more that never made it out of the room. That was by design. “I approached the wedding the same way I approach designing a collection. I knew myself well enough to know that if I made one dress six months in advance and declared it THE DRESS, I would spend the next six months designing ten more dresses and questioning everything. So instead, I gave myself lots of options.”

Seventeen gowns meant she never had to commit in advance. She could make “genuine game-time decisions based on how I felt, the light, the setting and, occasionally, pure dress-induced chaos.” The final count ran two gowns across the rehearsal dinner and welcome party, two for the ceremony, one for cocktails, one for the seated dinner, one for the first dance and cake cutting, one for the evening dance, two for the after party, and one for the send-off brunch. She had estimated she would wear somewhere between five and ten. “Shockingly the outfit changes were quick and seamless… and I exceeded my own estimation by one!”

Jax Seabrooke did her hair and Chelsea Regan Beauty did her makeup, and both stayed on for the entire day, which turns out to be the first thing Hayley tells other couples to do.

Going into the weekend, she was sure of exactly two things: the DRAWN TO YOU ballgown for the welcome party, and STORMING THE CASTLE, the blush lace ballgown, for the ceremony. Even that second call surprised her. For about six months the aisle plan had been Bambino, the blue-and-white toile ballgown she illustrated herself. Then, a few days before the wedding, her “First Looks Club” girls saw her in the pink lace ballgown and, in her words, “collectively had a reaction I could not ignore. My own jaw dropped too. That was it. The pink ballgown became The One.”

“There is probably a lesson in there about wedding dresses choosing you, which feels annoyingly poetic coming from a wedding dress designer, but it was true.”

Conrad Had Three Looks

“Conrad had three looks, which I thought was extremely respectable behavior for the groom of someone wearing eleven.” For the ceremony, a midnight-blue velvet tuxedo from Hive & Colony with a custom Starry Night lining, a nod to the Van Gogh painting Hayley and her dad recreated together for her childhood bedroom. For cocktails, he changed into a deep maroon dinner jacket that, as she puts it, “happened to look incredible” next to her iridescent LOVE IS KIND ballgown. For dinner, a white bamboo dinner jacket with a shawl collar, very James Bond, beside her NOCTURNE IN C gown of rhinestones, Chantilly lace, and chiffon. “He understood the assignment.”

His wedding gift from Hayley had vows on it. Every Christmas she customizes a pair of Converse for him, so for the wedding she made another pair and wrote their vows across the shoes.

A Place That Already Had a Soul

“We fell in love with the historical footprint of the Mission Inn. It has this wonderfully romantic, old-world California feeling…storied, a little mysterious, and completely transportive. We wanted somewhere that already had a soul before we ever started decorating it.” The brief SAMKOMA worked to was “Old-World California meets Mission Revival,” with rich tones, celestial details, candlelight, antique cartography, and what Hayley calls “a little bit of theatricality.” Her one-line version: “I wanted it to feel discovered rather than decorated.”

Heritage Floral Design built the installation at the chapel doors and ran the same mix down the aisle, picking up the fuchsia bougainvillea the Mission Inn already grows off its balconies rather than fighting it. Nothing about it is tidy. The arrangements spill and climb and keep going well past where a more careful florist would have stopped, until the whole thing reads like a garden that got into the building and stayed.

The Glimmer

Hayley invented a ritual for the top of the ceremony and gave it a name. “At the very beginning of our ceremony, after Conrad enters, he gets just a fleeting glimpse of me from one of the balconies and then I disappear. Part of me loved the romance of giving him this tiny preview before the real entrance. And part of me, admittedly, recognized an excellent opportunity for another wardrobe change. I love the idea that weddings allow you to inherit rituals, but they also give you permission to invent your own.”

Conrad walked in to Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” The glimmer itself played to Danny Elfman’s score from Edward Scissorhands, which Hayley picked for its “beautiful sense of wonder and almost childlike magic.” Then she was gone, the processional carried on without her, and somewhere inside the hotel her bridal team was getting her into the pink ballgown.

She came back down the aisle to “Sand Drawing” by Judah Earl. “It is sweeping and emotional and unapologetically dramatic.” Their dear friend James Hnat officiated, and the vows were handwritten, with nothing in their hands. “I wanted to look at him and hold hands the whole time.”

Before any of it happened, Hayley had already named this part as the center of the whole weekend: “For all the fashion and celebration surrounding a wedding, the ceremony is the quiet center of it. Always my favorite part and the one that feels the most intimate to me: standing across from the person you love and actually saying the things that all the beautiful things around you are meant to represent.”

Then the petals came down from the balconies, timed to the “I do.” Hayley shared that her favorite performance of the day was “courtesy of the raining of petals during the courtyard ceremony by Heritage Floral Design.” Her official position now: “I have now become aggressively pro-petal.”

Asked what getting married means to her, Hayley put it this way: “What a wonderful thing to have a witness to your life, but even more so a shared partnership of values and decision making. Someone who knows the mundane parts and the magnificent parts and chooses all of them.” On Conrad: “He’s incredibly discerning, resourceful and protective of the people he loves. There’s a steadiness to him that makes me feel very safe. He has always had my back, and I don’t take that quality in a person lightly.”

Their partnership runs into work as well. Conrad handles business affairs for the Hayley Paige brand. “We chose each other not only in love but, somewhat adventurously, in business as well.”

The couple also came back to the Mission Inn after the wedding for a separate portrait session with CHARD and MihociStudios, so the wedding day itself could stay a wedding. Hayley makes the full case for it in her advice further down.

Love the idea of a pink wedding dress? We shared another Hayley Paige bride in pink a few months ago!

The Dinner

“One of our favorite rituals at home is sitting down to dinner together every night, no matter how late one of us gets home. We usually open a bottle of wine and just catch up. So we wanted dinner at the wedding to feel important rather than like something happening between other events.” That meant a formal plated dinner and a filet, because they both love a great one. “There’s something so elegant about everyone actually sitting together, eating together and being present for a few hours.”

The wine was an Ancient Peaks Bordeaux blend bottled in 2019, the year they got engaged, so it had been aging for essentially the length of the engagement, “which felt like a very appropriate metaphor for a relationship with a long finish.” They renamed it “Seven Years Later” and Hayley illustrated a crest for the label.

Between the vows and the last song the changes kept coming: LOVE IS KIND for cocktails, NOCTURNE IN C for dinner, a look for the first dance and cake cutting, another for the evening dance, and two more for the after party. Eleven in total, and by her own account, not one of them slowed the night down.

Bambino

The blue-and-white toile is Hayley’s own illustration of their love story, and it did double duty over the weekend. Working with SAMKOMA and Curated Events Collective, she had it printed as custom dinner napkins, and it is the print on Bambino, the ballgown that spent six months as the aisle dress before it became “look number five of the day.” “Apparently designing the dress was not enough. The napkins also needed a narrative arc.”

and that RING!! We are obsessed.

Music, Woven Through

“Music has been part of our relationship from the night we met, so we wanted it to feel woven through the weekend rather than simply playing in the background.” They danced first to “Bless the Telephone” by Labi Siffre. “It is such a gentle, sentimental little song about the simplest part of loving someone: just being happy to hear their voice. For two people whose relationship started by sitting around playing songs for each other, it felt right.”

After dinner, they flipped the ceremony courtyard into the first stretch of the dance party. DJ Kristaval, with Jordan Kahn Music Company, set up directly in front of the chapel doors, which they left open so the chapel glowed behind her while everyone danced around the fountain. “It felt old-world and slightly surreal, which was exactly what we wanted.” Reusing the ceremony site for dancing is a move planners are always trying to engineer, because the space is already lit, already flowered, and already where everyone’s eyes went once.

Constellations, Cake, and a Confessional

The celestial thread Hayley kept returning to ended up underfoot. Something Painted Events hand-painted the dance floor. Dessert was three custom cakes from Vanessa Ross Cakes, each inspired by one of Hayley’s favorite gowns. “Apparently it was not enough for me to wear the dresses. They also needed to become dessert.” Klassey Confessions ran a confessional booth for guests, and Citrus & Co handled the charcuterie.

One last note from the weekend, in her words: “I wore a wedding dress to brunch the next morning. As a wedding dress designer, I could not come up with one compelling argument against it.”

Congratulations, Hayley and Conrad! All the best from GWS.