This Stylist Wore Sparkles for Her Wedding Celebration Amid Vineyards in Lisbon

When it came time to plan her wedding, Portuguese stylist Mafalda Patricio sought to create an experience that would reflect her distinct taste and prioritize fun for guests. “We always knew we wanted a wedding different from the ones we were used to seeing,” she says. She and her now-husband, surfboard designer Diogo Appleton, decided to have a garden ceremony and countryside celebration in Lisbon. 

Working with Tudo é Festa, the couple designed a simple ceremony centered around an altar of flowers executed by Catarina Sampaio Soares. For this, Mafalda wore the first of two dresses she had made by the Spanish designer Isabel Núñez, from Inuñez. Mafalda had never before imagined what her wedding dress would look like, and what was initially going to be a tulle design with ruffles ended up being a sleek bejeweled dress inspired by the 1920s. “The most difficult thing was choosing the fabric. I never, in my entire life, imagined that I would get married in sparkles, but Isabel told me that if I chose a simple silhouette we should choose a fabric that represented me,” Mafalda remembers. “And so it was, I couldn’t be happier with the decision to embroider the crystals.”

When it came time to walk down the aisle, “I always knew I wanted to enter the ceremony to the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, sung by my best friend Maria de Lima Mayer,” Mafalda says. “So she joined Tomás and Duarte to put the soundtrack to our wedding.”

For the countryside celebration, “we wanted a long table in the middle of the vineyards, outdoors, which here in Lisbon is always a risk. There was no theme as such, but I liked that all the decoration and all the details managed to convey who Diogo and I are,” Mafalda says. A red-striped table was set with colorful crystalware and bright flowers, and the landscape of infinite vineyards did the rest. 

Her second look starred a minimalist mini-dress with a voluminous skirt, aesthetically opposite to the one she wore at the ceremony. “I wanted it to be low-cut and strapless. It started out as a jumpsuit with a sheer skirt over it but at the penultimate fitting, I told Isabel that I wanted to change everything. I wanted it to be very different from the first one, so we decided to make a short balloon skirt,” Mafalda explains. The party-ready moment was complete with shoes from Carel.

Mafalda and Diogo remember their wedding in Lisbon as a magical, memorable day: “Without a doubt, the best thing was being able to celebrate our love with the most important people in our lives in a magical place on an incredible day.”