The Bride Wore a Vintage ’90s Dress and a Belgian Lace Veil to Marry Underneath South Carolina Oaks
Wedding photographer Anne Rhett and Matthew Appleby married at his family’s moss-draped farm on the South Carolina coast—the same place where his parents and maternal grandparents also said their vows.
Reported by Vogue.
There's a particular kind of bride who has spent years behind the lens at other people's most significant moments — and when it's finally her turn, she knows exactly what she wants. Anne Jervey Rhett, a Charleston-based wedding photographer, married golf professional Matthew Appleby at Sunny Point Farm on Wadmalaw Island, a property that has been in Matthew's mother's family for generations. His parents married there. His grandparents married there. The moss, the oaks, the river — all of it inherited, all of it intentional.
The couple's origin story reads like something Anne herself might have shot: two kids from the same Charleston high school, reconnecting years later when Matthew's sister hired Anne to photograph her wedding. He flirted; she deflected, professionally. When the gallery dropped, he used it as his opening. The proposal came two years later on the pink-sand beaches of Harbour Island in the Bahamas — ring in pocket for months, friends secretly flown in to witness it, groom visibly nervous and, by his own admission, "looking a little unwell." She said yes anyway.
The Wardrobe Was the Weekend
According to Vogue, Anne's bridal fashion was coordinated through Over The Moon style director and former Vogue editor Grace Givens, who connected her with emerging designers for each event. The welcome party called for Lein's Heidi dress; the rehearsal dinner, an Alexandra Pijut feathered cape that made her feel like Stevie Nicks. But the wedding day look was the thesis statement: a late-'90s Catherine Rayner gown sourced from Monet of Vionette vintage in Atlanta — ivory with age, full-skirted, floral-embellished, and exactly what Anne describes as the dress her middle-school self conjured somewhere between Saved by the Bell and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Paired with a well-worn Belgian lace veil, a family heirloom delivered, characteristically, in a plastic garbage bag. The party dress was a feathered, bejeweled corset by One/Of, constructed from Chanel deadstock fabric. "Bury me in this look, please," Anne said. Matthew wore a custom Peter Millar tuxedo; instead of a boutonniere, a brooch from his late grandmother Theodora Walpole's collection. Every man in both families wore one of her pins.
The ceremony unfolded at 6 p.m. beneath ancient oak trees overlooking the river, with a ring bearer who refused to cooperate until the eldest flower girl scooped him up like a football and carried him across. Anne's mother walked her down the aisle — a choice made in honor of the father she lost to cancer in college. Cocktail hour dissolved into a tented lawn reception, a live band, "Pink Pony Club," and a costume box full of wigs and masks. Planning was handled by Gathering Events, who translated Anne's shellcore mood board — tasseled cabanas, striped awnings, cascading florals — into something elegant and completely unserious in the best possible way.
When you've spent your career making other people's love look cinematic, you already know the secret: the best weddings aren't perfect, they're specific — and Anne Rhett Appleby's was both.
Read the original at Vogue.
