Supper Club Theme meets Tomato Girl Summer

This vibrant celebration, featured in Brides and brought to life by the talented team at Grit & Grace Inc., was a masterclass in balancing trend-forward style with timeless elegance.

Chelsea and Cory met on a dating app, got engaged on the rooftop of their New York City apartment after dinner at their favorite sushi spot, and then planned a wedding so good that two strangers crashed it. The crashers left a card from "Uncle David and Aunt Nancy" containing $11.54 before being escorted out. This tells you everything you need to know about the energy of this day.

This one was featured in Brides. Lisa Ziesing shot it. And honestly it deserved every bit of the attention it got.

The concept

Chelsea and Cory wanted their wedding to feel like a summer supper club with their nearest and dearest all in the same place for multiple days. The tomato girl summer theme was not an aesthetic exercise. It came from a genuine obsession with heirloom tomatoes in all their juicy red, yellow, and orange glory, and from an August engagement that made a late June wedding feel like peak summer in every sense.

Planner Laura Ritchie of Grit and Grace took that energy and ran with it. Kelsey Maile Design built an invitation suite with scallop shapes that nodded to a sliced tomato. Chelsea's mother made welcome boxes and had a family friend bake 75 loaves of banana bread, one for each box. Every single detail had a reason to exist and you could feel it.

The looks

Chelsea designed her own dress with Elizabeth Fillmore. A custom beaded slip with a sleeveless high-neck overlay that she did not fully see come together until a fitting two weeks before the wedding, at which point she asked them to remove the original long sleeves and it became exactly what she had always imagined. Cory's tuxedo had a tomato-red lining embroidered with their initials and wedding date, and he wore his grandfather's gold band and his late grandmother's handkerchief as a pocket square.

The welcome party look was a Khaite silk slip printed with red lips and Badgley Mischka heart-heeled shoes. The dress code was chic and colorful and guests showed up accordingly.

The ceremony

Held in the round on Salamander's lawn, guests on all four sides. Sweet Root Village did the florals with spider gerbera daisies, clematis, yarrow, and actual tomato vines climbing through everything in red, peach, orange, and yellow. The Sage String Quartet played Fly Me to the Moon for the processional as a nod to Chelsea's late grandfather, then shifted into Billy Joel's Vienna as her parents walked her down the aisle. Personal vows. Lots of tears. They walked back out to Lose Control by Teddy Swims.

The reception

Chelsea's dad secretly worked with Laura to cover the entire ballroom carpet and line the walls with two-toned pink draping. Chelsea had been dreaming about it and had no idea it was actually happening. The room looked like the best possible version of a summer speakeasy. Long tables with hand-drawn placemats, orange lamps, blue glassware, knotted pink-striped linens, cobalt flatware. The escort cards were live tomatoes calligraphed with guests' names. The custom pink bar had hand-drawn illustrations of cocktail glasses, tomatoes, and their monogram with bunches of cherry tomatoes scattered throughout.

Chelsea's second look was a tomato-red sequined mini dress with heart embellishments from Area NYC because red for the theme, hearts for love, and just very her. Her dad asked the band to play an extra hour into the after party, the same thing her late grandfather Papa had done at her parents' wedding. Late night snacks included pickles on a stick from their favorite Bryant Park vendor, Pickle Me Pete.

The party was so good two people crashed it. They left $11.54 and the names Uncle David and Aunt Nancy before being escorted out.

On the photography

This was a wedding where every single detail was chosen for a reason and our job was to make sure none of it got lost. The tomato girl summer trend has already cycled through the internet several times. This wedding will still be worth looking at in twenty years because it was never really about a trend. It was about two people who knew exactly who they were and built a whole weekend around that.

See the full feature from Brides here.