Wedding | Mollie & Aaron

Tell us a little about yourselves!

We’re Mollie and Aaron. We met on Hinge in July 2024, just six weeks after Mollie moved to Chicago, where Aaron had been living for the past decade. We’re both eldest children (with all the responsibility and reliability that often comes with that role), huge foodies, and share an abiding love for all things interior design. 

We’ve both been on the vendor side of a lot of weddings (Mollie as a wedding photographer and Aaron as a musician) so when it came to what we wanted to do for ourselves, we felt comfortable taking the parts of a traditional wedding that felt compelling to us, adding some other elements we loved, and leaving the rest behind. We decided on an intimate destination wedding in Italy because we’re both too relational to elope but also didn’t want a big crowd.

Why did you decide to get married where you did?

Mollie: As crazy as it sounds since I was single at the time, I knew going into grad school that there would be this “ideal window” to get married during the summer of 2026, after which point, I would start needing clinical hours and wouldn’t be able to take time off easily. As it happens, I met Aaron a couple months before I started my program. We got engaged in August of 2025 and that summer wedding I’d pictured wildly worked out.

Aaron: I pretty much knew after our second date that something was different about this girl, but I never wanted Mollie to feel rushed or pressured to figure out how she felt. We said we would date “as long as we needed, as fast as we could.” Ultimately, we went from first meeting to married in under two years which, in your thirties, feels just about right.

How many guests did you have?

36. Just immediate family and our closest friends and partners (basically, the people we would have asked to be in our bridal party, if we’d had one!). Everyone stayed on-site at our venue, a boutique hotel in Matera, Italy, for several days. 

What was your budget?

Around 70k.

Tell us about your outfits.

Fashion is something we both really enjoy and we wanted to curate different looks for each of our wedding events. We designed a custom website for our wedding with visual mood boards of each event to give our guests a feel for the colour palette, formality level and general aesthetic we were going for. The wedding itself was black tie optional with an “experimental twist.” We told our guests this was their chance to wear something they might never have a chance to wear otherwise (capes, trains, bows, etc.). 

We actually both ended up keeping our wedding looks a surprise from one another. It made that first look moment that much sweeter for it being such an affirmation of how well we know each other because they went together perfectly.

Mollie wore a soft pink silk Katherine Tash gown that blended romantic fluidity with asymmetrical architectural details. Her veil was handmade by her mother, and she accessorized with large gold floral and pearl drop earrings from Jenny Yoo and jacquard heels from Badgley Mischka. She wore a ring from her mother (her something blue) and an heirloom bracelet from her mother-in-law to symbolize the two families coming together.

Aaron went black on black with his double breasted tux from Paisley & Grey and passed on a tie, opting instead for a dramatic gold lapel chain and several of his father’s vintage brooches, including one that’s a map of Guyana, where his dad is from, and the Jamaican flag where his mom was born.

Mollie: I also surprised my dad by wearing a green beaded sari for the rehearsal dinner, as a little nod to my Southeast Asian heritage on his side. I couldn’t wait for him to see me on the wedding day, but even more excited to do a mini first look the day before because I thought that moment would be even more meaningful to him.

What was the most important aspect for you, in terms of planning your wedding?

Having worked at or attended dozens of weddings between the two of us, we’d seen firsthand how often couples barely see most of the people who attend and talk to even fewer. We knew that wasn’t what we wanted for ourselves. We didn’t want to feel rushed or like we’d missed anyone. It was really important to us to actually be present with our best friends in this rare moment when we all got to be together -- drink wine, eat incredible food, and dance until we were too tired to keep going. 

Overall, our vision for our wedding was for it to feel like “a friend trip that made it out of the group chat.” We both have incredible friend groups who have been there for us through a lot of different seasons, and we wanted our wedding to be a way to celebrate those people. We put a lot of thought into intentional moments throughout the wedding week that would make each person feel loved and appreciated. For example, we hand wrote notes to every guest individually and used them as the place cards for our welcome party. Since there were only 36 guests, we walked around the table at dinner and introduced everyone to the group, sharing who they were to us, some of our favourite things about them, and why other guests should think they were amazing (and should get to know them over the next couple days).

Were there any elements that were important for you to incorporate?

As creatives ourselves, it was important to us for our artistic team to feel like they could take our overarching vision – the experience we wanted to curate, the overall vibe and feel – and really run with it, be experimental, a little avant-garde, etc.

We’re both such foodies and a lot of our friends are too, so incredible food and wine was a non-negotiable for us. This was a major deciding factor in why we ended up in Italy!

We wanted the whole experience to be unforgettable. If we were really going to ask our friends and family to fly across the world to celebrate us, we wanted to throw the party of the decade for them. 

Any tips for couples getting married?

In today’s day and age, with social media, Pinterest, etc., it’s frighteningly easy to get caught up in the “content” of it all. Don’t forget to keep the main thing the main thing – the joining of your lives and the celebration of your love.

It feels a little vulnerable to share this with the internet, but I (Mollie) had this moment where I felt disappointed because rain caused our reception to pivot indoors instead of being in a roofless warehouse that had been a huge part of why I picked that venue. I had to remind myself, while I was entirely allowed to be sad about missing a piece of content, all our guests were having the time of their lives -- and that was happening whether it rained or not. Don’t get me wrong, I styled the heck out of that week to make it as gorgeous and content-worthy as possible. But in that moment, I’d done everything I could and now it was time to trust my team, let it go, and not miss my own wedding because I was waiting for the sun to come out (which it did, complete with a rainbow, just long enough for us to keep our ceremony outdoors).

Are there any vendors that you would like to tell us a little more about?

Honestly, we could rave all day about how incredible our vendors were, especially because it rained on our wedding day and they had to pivot from Plan A to B to C. That said, our venue team at the Masseria Fontana di Vite killed it in every way. They were so kind and accommodating and truly bent over backward to help bring our vision to life. It can be difficult to know how things will come together with a destination wedding when you can’t visit in advance and see the space, taste the food, etc., but they made the experience feel simultaneously turn-key and personalized just for us. They treated us as though we were their favourite clients and like they don’t do this every weekend for other people. Also, no one we know will be able to top the menu their chef put together. It was to die for. We can’t recommend them enough.

We’d be remiss to not to mention our photographers, Gracie and Isaiah Causey from GREDDINS. We primarily hired vendors local to the Puglia, but decided to fly these two in because we love their work so much. Gracie spent a lot of time researching the perfect film stock and delivered a creative brief before the wedding that absolutely nailed the aesthetic we’d discussed. It made us feel so confident going into the week because we knew we were all on the same page in terms of the overall vision and feeling of the event (and then she freaking delivered!! We couldn’t be more obsessed with the images).

Photographer: Greddins @_greddins | Planning & Styling: by Mollie | Flora: Emozioni Floreali da Flora  @irismiccolifloraldesigner; Flowers2000 (Rehearsal Dinner) @flowers_duemila | Videographer: Noah Master @mastercaptured; Stratvid (Drone) @strat.vid | Ceremony & Reception Location: Masseria Fontana di Vite @masseriafontanadivite | Celebrant: Jake Riemer @jake__riemer | Table & Glassware Hire: FG Eventi  @fgeventi | MUA: Daniela Zenone @daniela_zenone_ | Catering, Cake & Beverages:

Chef Filippo Mercede from Masseria Fontana di Vite  @masseriafontanadivite @filippomercede | Stationery: Designed by Mollie, assembled by Mollie's mother | DJ: Limitless Event DJs @limit

lesseventdjs | Dresses: Katherine Tash @katherinetash from Alice in Ivory @aliceinivorydallas | Rehearsal Dinner Sari: Lashkaraa @lashkaraa | Suit: Paisley & Gray @paisleyandgray | Veil: Handmade by Mollie's mother | Alterations: Silver Moon Chicago @silvermoonchicago | Sound & Lighting: Meraki @musicalstore2005 | Engagement & Weddings Rings: Olive Ave Jewelry @oliveavejewelr | Mollie's Shoes: Badgley Mischka @badgleymischkabride | Earrings: Jenny Yoo @jennyyoonyc | Necklace: Anthropologie | Other Jewellery & Brooches: Family Heirlooms | Lapel Chain: Etsy