Lou Stoppard and Jamie Shaw always knew they would have a small wedding. “It fitted the time of life we were in,” says Lou, a writer and curator, who gave birth to a daughter, Clark, 10 months before she walked down the aisle in London’s Fitzrovia Chapel. “I didn’t have the brain space to think about hiring linens or glassware, so we ended up relying on the skills of our amazing friends and family.”
The two creatives (Shaw is a fine object designer, whose “blob” vases you may have seen on Instagram) had a talented line-up to call upon. Max Rocha, of Café Cecilia, hosted a wedding breakfast of bacon sarnies and homemade scones for the bride and groom, along with their closest family, and Stoppard wore Simone Rocha to the service in the ornate former hospital chapel. “I roped the Rochas in in a big way!” laughs Lou, who made the five-minute journey from The London Edition to the ceremony on foot, wearing the whimsical pearl-bedecked dress she likens to a child’s drawing of a bridal look.
“I found the idea of choosing a wedding dress a headache,” shares Stoppard, who sent Rocha a few pictures from previous collections but ultimately said, “Do whatever you want.” Simone declared it the best possible brief to receive from a bride and imagined an ivory confection that, says Lou, looked like it belonged to a different era. For a new mother still breastfeeding her little girl, the tropes of womanhood stitched into the very seams of Rocha’s work resonated with Stoppard as much as the thoughtfulness at the heart of her wedding dress. “I took Clark to fittings and the exaggerated curve of the hip was almost perfect to hold a baby on,” notes the bride of the special collaboration with the friend she met while working as a young journalist at Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.
“It sounds unromantic, but there was an inevitability to the marriage and a sense of completing the family we have started,” continues Lou. Accordingly, Rocha, a mother of two herself, outfitted Jamie in one of her interesting takes on classic menswear suits and recommended Monbebe for a sweet snowdrop-colored look for Clark in the same realm. Lou went one further and sewed pearls around a Joha bonnet, so that her daughter’s face was shrouded by a halo of beads akin to those adorning her wedding dress. For the 70 guests lining the marble and mosaic-tiled space, it was adorable, but for the bride, having her daughter perched on her hip dissipated any nerves that might have bubbled up underneath all that tulle. “Holding Clark punctured any of the formality or stiffness and made it really intimate and light,” she explains. “Jamie and I had already made such a big commitment to each other, so the wedding didn’t feel momentous in that way. It felt special, but different.”