Designers Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre Held an Unconventional Wedding in the Belgian Countryside

The couple also decided to forgo a wedding planner. “We naively thought that after staging Paris Fashion Week shows, it would be a piece of cake to organize a wedding,” says Ester. “But there’s an emotional, intimate, and unique dimension to a wedding that takes the planning to a whole new level.” For Ester and Balthazar, it was a no-brainer that they wanted to manage the wedding themselves. “With our brand, we have an extremely precise aesthetic vision, and in our personal lives, we take immense pleasure in entertaining and throwing dinner parties,” says Ester, noting that they spent a lot of time in flea markets hunting down the decorations and tableware for the big day: napkins, stainless-steel ice cream bowls, vases, tablecloths, and dishes. “Everything came from secondhand shops or were objects salvaged from our families.”

She adds: “The wedding was the perfect excuse to combine the passion of our private lives with our professional aesthetic vision. What’s more, we’re surrounded by talented craftsmen, artists, visual artists, sound engineers, technicians, writers, and so on. It was a fantastic opportunity to build this project with them.”

There’s certainly no lack of talent in their inner circle. Odile Gautreau, one of their favorite models and a multihyphenate, played a DJ set, while Belgian journalist Anne-Françoise Moyson was the emcee of the lay ceremony. Their regular backstage photographer, Nicolas Kuttler, took the photos, and for the glam, they relied on Guerlain makeup specialist Nakani Keita and Brussels-based hairstylist Mika Bassanelli. Meanwhile, Jeanne Viviès and Sonia Oet, who run a ceramics collectsive named Four, took care of the cocktail buffet. Their speciality? They cook according to the ceramic container they’ve created beforehand. (Or sometimes it’s the other way round: They create a ceramic object to suit the dish they want to cook.) Ester says: “I find this very connected to our vision of clothing that adapts to the body. The relationship between container and content is always very poetic. That’s what we try to do every day through our collectsions, so I love it when girls do it in the kitchen!”

The fashion industry was well represented too, including casting director William Lhoest, who is behind the inclusive casting of the Ester Manas and Marine Serre shows; Belgian stylist Benoit Bethume; accessories designer Marianna Ladreyt; muse Charline Mignot (a.k.a. the singer Vendredi sur mer), and Telly Jalily, Demna’s assistant at Balenciaga, who ended up catching the bridal bouquet.

The groom also didn’t experience the traditional surprise of seeing the wedding dress for the first time on the big day. Balthazar and Ester design all their collectsions together, and so it was with the three wedding dresses that Ester wore. “This brand was born with the mission of dressing all women, regardless of their morphologies,” she explains. “For the moment, the wardrobe we offer is essentially linked to parties and celebrations. In fact, the theme of our last show was weddings. So the aim of this wardrobe was also to be able to dress myself and answer the question: Why can’t I find sexy and desirable clothes in a range of sizes? It was absolutely clear that every dress I wore to the wedding would be an Ester Manas.”

For the civil ceremony held on Monday, she sported a white knitwear dress with an oversized vintage wool suit jacket and Miista sandals. For the lay ceremony, it was a lingerie dress made with five different laces from deadstock, featuring lots of cutouts and transparencies. There were many fittings along the way. “It’s actually quite difficult to design for yourself and have enough distance to know if it’s the right piece,” says Ester. The dress for the party was a slip dress in white jersey and tulle and was worn with Balthazar’s family veil, handmade with Brussels lace and passed down from woman to woman since 1900. The jewelry was from the Ester Manas collectsion.

Balthazar wore a Fursac suit and a vintage Dries Van Noten shirt paired with his grandfather’s knit silk-cotton tie.

The dinner menu was printed on T-shirts that were placed on each table setting. “We really wanted to combine our passion for food, entertaining, and dining with our other passion—clothes—and to do it with a sense of humor,” says Ester. In lieu of individual plates, there were family-size dishes (vegetarian meatballs all prepared by Ester, roasted eggplants), meaning greater conviviality and less waste, while the meal ended with Belgian cheese and sesame cake.

For guests who were hungry after dancing the night away, there was a baraque à frites, or the Belgian answer to a food truck serving fries, in the car park. As for their honeymoon? With their wedding-themed fall 2023 collectsion hitting stores this month, they’ll be taking a trip to New York to coincide with the opening of the exhibition “Women Dressing Women” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Naturally, one of their creations will be displayed in the show.