Dior’s New Look Inspired This Bride’s Dress for Her English Garden Wedding

The proposal was no less memorable. Matt made up a fake plan with friends and dragged his reluctant soon-to-be fiancé out of bed early on a Saturday morning. Instead of an Uber waiting outside, there was a white Cinquecento, which harked back to their first date: an Italian picnic in the grounds of the Serpentine. The extra sweetener? The suited chauffeur holding two coffees for the couple to sip while taking them on a wild goose chase around London. After hours of being tourists in their own city, they arrived at Hyde Park to recreate that first special Serpentine date—this time with professional caterers. “As he went down on one knee to do the classic proposal, which basically made me cry for about four days, we were fortunate enough to have wonderful passersby wish us luck and take pictures,” recalls Toma. “It was like something out of a TV show.”

A date with their friends awaited at the Windsor Castle in West London, the scene of many of Toma’s birthdays. “We announced the news and, with everyone screeching and crying, we drank the pub dry,” she recalls of showing off her grandmother’s engagement ring, which Toma’s mother had slid across the table at Chez Bruce (mother’s intuition had told her what the lunch was for). Matt and Toma then worked with the Ring Concierge to realize the bride’s dream emerald-cut diamond set with traps on a minimal thin gold band, “so that the stones felt like they were the stars.” “The first time I put it on, it all felt very, very real and that we had entered into the next stages of the wedding and marriage process,” she recalls.

Toma and Matt’s wedding date was two years to the day since they met back on July 16, 2020. After the church service, guests headed to a marquee that the bride says, “had a sense of wedding drama, but was cozy and intimate, like the best dinner party you’d been to with a sense of surprise.” Three long tables were festooned with flowers, inspired by the bouquets Matt gifted Toma fortnightly from their first date onwards, with pretty place settings by Embellishing the Ordinary, who also created their invitations. (Consistency on the visuals was key for Toma, who is head of creative productions at Matchesfashion.com, and Matt, a senior creative director for a FinTech company.)