The Wedding Showcase: A Moment For The Beautiful Mother Of The Bride

In 2014, Kathy Weigel, a Brooklyn mother of two daughters — and a longtime summer resident of Lakeville — stepped out of an upscale department store in Manhattan with a shopping bag filled with Armani and feeling sorely unhappy about it. In the grand scheme of things, not the worst problem to have. Weddings though, as many of us know, can be a strange time in one’s life, even when you’re not the bride.

Midtown blues 

Looking back on it, Weigel described the bag’s contents as, “a pink thing.” Friends had accompanied her to select the outfit she would wear to her eldest daughter’s wedding, and what she had ended up with was, in addition to its bubble-gum hue, “poufy with rhinestone buttons. It was not me.” 

In the store it was met with approval. “All of my friends said it was perfect. This is the perfect dress. I had it right. This is appropriate for the mother of the bride.” At home, inspecting her purchase, she was less sure. 

She described her dream garment as “understated, classic, conservative, but with style.” Driving around Millerton a few weekends later, as chance would have it, her dream appeared out of the corner of her eye — hanging in the window of Gilmor Glass Works.

What can’t you find in Millerton?

Inside the shop, Weigel said she “saw this one outfit that was off to the side of the inventory. I picked it up and this woman turned to me and said, ‘Well, I’m glad you like it, but that’s mine.’”

Perhaps, in its own comedic stage-play way, that little scene was the perfect introduction for Weigel to the work of Annie Walwyn-Jones, a designer whose dresses, jackets and skirts inspire a sense of ownership. Often doing custom work for her clients, the London-born designer has found a niche in the wedding industry all too often overlooked: the mother of the bride. A figure, it quickly becomes clear, that Walwyn-Jones sees with a sense of affinity and allegiance. After all, she’s played the part herself.

A mother dressing mothers

Over a long-distance phone call to Mexico, where Walwyn-Jones and her husband hide away from the frigid temperatures of New England winters, she explained just how momentous selecting a mother of the bride outfit can be. 

“It’s so important to look good at your son or daughter’s wedding. It’s a time when you’re photographed by a professional, and that doesn’t really happen for the rest of one’s life.” Sure, she said, we have snapshots of festive moments on our phones, but the wedding photo she knows exists in a special space, framed and held onto by the family for generations. If you look good in the wedding photo, “you look good forever,” Walwyn-Jones reasoned. 

As a Brit abroad in New York City, at 21 she enrolled in Parsons School of Design, having grown up making many of her own clothes to better suit her height ­— with the exception of her debutante season. “My designer went a bit over the top...” Now she makes sure women always feel their best.

In fashion, when much of what “looks good” on a woman is dictated by the ideals and restrictions of a male designer, Walwyn-Jones’ clothes, at once soft and structural, with draped skirts that fold in geometric designs, are constructed with the empathy of a woman dressing her peers. With silhouettes in mind for any figure (Walwyn-Jones will readily describe herself as “pear-shaped”) she finds patterns and fabrics intended to flatter, not constrict. In discussing what influences and inspires her, she was candid enough to admit she’s woven some of her old insecurities into the very nature of taste. “I had an aunt with chubby arms, and while I never got them, I never wore sleeveless dresses out of fear that I might. I do make sleeveless items, and the Greenwich set wear sleeveless clothes quite readily.” 

The focus is always on the comforts of her clients, women whom Walwyn-Jones says she often admires. “It’s really a treat to get to work with them,” she said of the busy, working women who appreciate her sense of what’s “quite classic and reasonably feminine without being too revealing. I think it’s really hard to buy clothes like that. I don’t know if I could walk into Bergdorf’s now and walk out with a dress I wanted to wear.”

What she’s presented is a cozy, country alternative: Leave Manhattan and head up to the hamlet of Ancramdale, N.Y., where women like Weigel step into the studio located in Walwyn-Jones’ smalltown home for fittings and alterations. It’s a personalized, collaborative effort, and one Weigel returned to again when her second daughter, Julia, was married in the fall of 2017. When Julia’s bohemian-styled dress looked incomplete, Walwyn-Jones even crafted a special jeweled and silk belt as the finishing touch.

Julia explained that after searching for a bit of “glitz and sparkle,” and finding options that cost half the price of the wedding dress, Walwyn-Jones offered to make the belt herself. “It was her idea. She was such a pleasure to work with. She used the best kind of silk and did a beautiful job.”

It takes a New England village

Kathy Weigel found that working with Walwyn-Jones turned out to be “one of the more enjoyable aspects of planning a wedding.” Her final looks, it turned out, were a community effort. Jan Gilmor found Weigel the perfect shoes and necklace to go with Walwyn-Jones’ outfit. For Julia’s wedding, the mother of the bride wore earrings from Joie Maison in Salisbury, which she said the shop was kind enough to allow her to take home and try on with the dress. “It was really was like The Northwest Corner dresses the Brooklyn mother!”

Both the Weigel daughters were married in New York City, but come spring Kathy Weigel will be wearing her second mother-of-the-bride dress to a wedding at LionRock Farm in Sharon. The bride will be the daughter of another couple who split their time between New York City and Litchfield County, and will be photographed by Cody Raisig, making his event debut in rural Connecticut. Perhaps, when it comes to weddings at least, “country” really does have all the style “town.”

For more information about Annie Walwyn-Jones visit www.walwyn-jones.com.

— Alexander Wilburn