This Couture Bride’s Custom Gown Featured Hundreds of Mother-of-Pearl Buttons Belonging to Her Grandmother and Parents

As a creative consultant for the likes of Harrods, Shiseido, Omorovicza, Christian Louboutin, and De Beers, Iona Judd is, in the crudest terms, paid for having vision, taste, and style. And so, when it came to planning her own wedding earlier this spring—arguably her highest-stakes gig to date—all the deliverables, from designing a logo, to custom-building a DJ booth, had to be executed to the same assiduously honed standards. “There were points when my fiancé was like, ‘What are you doing? This isn’t a client project!’, and I was like, ‘We are the clients!’,” she says. “Everyone thought I’d be a bit of a bridezilla, but I was actually so chilled. I mean, it was the most fun brief I’ve ever worked on.”

Judd technically met her now-husband, Elliot Mason, while on a girls trip to Ibiza, the summer before sitting her A-Levels. “It was a hedonistic weekend,” she says. “And I can barely remember it, if I’m honest, let alone meeting him.” Fast forward seven years, and Judd, then a 24-year-old Central Saint Martins jewelry design graduate, happened to match with the same Elliot on Bumble. “I discovered that we had lots of mutual friends, and over the course of our first date at Bar Termini, was informed that we had not only met at several of their parties, but even had full-on conversations, which, again, I couldn’t quite recall.” Judd scuttled home, a little mortified, while Mason required gentle persuading to go on a second outing. “Who would ever have thought we’d be getting married all these years later?”

The engagement took place on a wet and wild stretch of coastline famed for having been the place where 68 Celtic Christian monks were slaughtered in 806AD on the remote isle of Iona—Judd’s namesake—in the Inner Hebrides. “It was pissing it down, both of us were in waterproofs, and I basically demanded that Elliot take a photo of me, Iona, on Iona,” Judd recalls. “As I jumped up and down, he sort of murmured something to me, and so I turned around and he was on one knee.” She, of course, said yes. “I think my soul left my body for about 15 seconds. It was just the most surreal, magical thing.” The wedding, she hoped, would take place beneath the sunnier skies of the Peloponnese, but the gods had other plans. “We went on a recce to Kardamyli, and found an abandoned amphitheater overlooking the ocean,” she adds. “It was beautiful, but the village elders vetoed the idea, essentially.”