Would You Wear Jeans to Your Own Wedding? This Brooklyn Stylist Did

When it comes to weddings, there’s a somewhat standard formula that brides both traditional and quirky tend to stick to: white wedding dress, heavily styled venue, rows of bridesmaids in coordinating ensembles—you get the picture. But when Brooklyn-based stylist Claudia Cifu tied the knot with advertising executive Niclas Kristiansson, she did none of the above.

“I knew that I didn’t want to wear anything white. I wanted the outfit to feel very me,” said Cifu. So in lieu of a white wedding gown, she wore denim. And instead of a dramatic venue, she went for the laid-back vibes of City Hall. “I don’t think either of us ever saw ourselves having a conventional church wedding,” she said.

But then again, there’s nothing conventional about this couple’s love story, except maybe the fact that they’re both from Finland. The two found each other in the most modern way possible—on social media. “We met two years ago after I planned a solo soul-searching trip to Panama. I put a posting up on Facebook to rent out my New York City apartment while my roommate and I were out of town, and an old acquaintance from Finland responded that she knew another Finnish person looking for somewhere to stay in New York,” she said.

It only took Cifu and her houseguest two days to fall for each other when she returned from Panama. After that, their relationship took off, with the pair traveling back and forth between Finland and the States to see each other. Several months later, he proposed to her at a beautiful villa in a small city outside of Helsinki. “I remember being very moody that day for some reason. He wanted to propose outside near this beautiful lake with sparkling wine, but I complained about how cold I was,” she said. He eventually worked up the courage to ask her inside their suite. “He was so nervous. I noticed how ill he looked and how sweaty his hands were. The next minute, he was on his knee. I couldn’t believe it.”

Instead of a big wedding, the pair decided to go the much simpler route and got hitched at City Hall in New York with just their parents and eight of their closest friends by their side. As for her outfit? “I didn’t really know what it was going to be,” the bride admitted. It was when she tagged along with a friend to a vintage trade show that she found the cream-color floor-length lace dress of her dreams—well, sort of. “The straight silk dress look wasn’t me, though, so I ended up cutting and sewing it into a top, with the lace draping in the front and back.” Sometimes a little DIY goes a long way.

Of course, cutting a dress into a top comes with its own set of problems, mainly what to wear on the bottom. For the stylist, jeans were the only choice. She dug through her extensive collection of Levi’s 501s to find the perfect pair to match. “I tried the top with a bunch of different washes. I knew what style I wanted them to be: not too tight but comfy, not too torn but not too fresh and polished either.” After going through many pairs, she settled on a style she had purchased from a vintage store about five or six years prior and finished off her look with a red lip and an even redder pair of velvet brocade heels by Dries Van Noten.

“It was perfect, and I think the most important thing was that I felt so comfortable in it. I felt very me,” she said. “I guess I could look back 30 years from now and say, ‘Oh, God, what was I wearing?’ But it won’t matter, because I’ll remember how great I felt.”