A Bicultural Mallorca Wedding With Paper Parasols and Red Chinese Knots

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Liany and Brian flew to Mallorca for three days built on Chinese and Jewish tradition, island food and a wardrobe edited with a fashion insider’s eye. Holding every thread was The Wedding Company, the planning and styling studio that turned two venues and a long roster of island creatives into one coherent visual language. Their hand is all over the details that give this wedding its identity: red Chinese knots tied to dinner menus, paper parasols handed out before the chuppah, blossom embroidery stitched onto ceremony cushions.

Location: Mallorca, Spain
Style: Bicultural, Intimate, Playful
Number of guests: 48
Setting: Historic Countryside Estate
Season: Spring

Liany and Brian met as juniors at Princeton, at a formal on the terrace of Brian’s eating club, and 2025 marked a full decade together. Home today is Brooklyn, shared with their dog, Otter. Liany works in retail and fashion consulting and Brian is a healthcare investor, a pairing that shows in a weekend where every visual choice has a reason behind it. Liany was born in China and grew up between Japan, Sweden and the United States, and the wedding switches between cultural codes with the ease of someone who has always lived that way.

France and Italy made the shortlist, and Mallorca won on two counts: the couple had vacationed there seven years earlier, and the island’s table matches their own favorites, from seafood and olives to tapas. They pitched the destination to guests as an excuse to plan a trip with their partners, and the weekend opened at Castillo Hotel Son Vida, the castle hotel in the hills above Palma where guests also stayed.

Bride's Morning & Fashion

Liany’s morning runs on an off duty uniform: coffee to go, and the Danielle Frankel garment bag riding next to her in the back seat with the seatbelt across it. Sinem Yavsaner kept the makeup close to skin, with a soft flush and a lip painted on with a fine brush instead of swiped from a bullet.

The gown is Danielle Frankel, a New York label made in the Garment District whose founder was the first bridal designer ever selected for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, back in 2019. Rachel at Danielle Frankel helped Liany land on this one: silk crushed into fine vertical pleats from bodice to hem, a strapless line and a zip running straight down the back. For the ceremony Liany added a sheer tulle top with a high neck and long sleeves, and she kept it on through dinner, dancing and a full outfit change.

The veil is hand painted with pink cherry blossoms, a nod to Liany’s Chinese heritage that also rhymes with the almond trees that turn the island pink every winter. Danielle Frankel made floral earrings to match, so the blossom motif runs from the hairline down. On her feet are Prada pumps in cream patent leather with a square toe and a low heel, the brand she wore across all three days.

Groom’s Fashion

Brian goes for the warm weather version of black tie: an ivory dinner jacket with a shawl collar, black trousers, a black bow tie, black studs down the shirt front and a black cummerbund, with a white boutonniere on the lapel. Traditional menswear rules reserve the white dinner jacket for summer evenings and hot climates, which makes Mallorca its natural habitat.

Ceremony

The ceremony moved to Finca Morneta in Binissalem, an estate dating to the 13th century that still keeps a 17th century olive oil press and a 16th century wine cellar on the property. The chuppah went up under the olive trees in front of the stone facade, framed in white and blush roses with white fabric draped across the top.

A chuppah stays open on all sides in reference to Abraham’s tent, and planting it among olive trees, the most symbolically loaded tree in the Mediterranean, doubles the meaning without a single extra prop.

Guests each got a white paper parasol ribbed with bamboo, the object that shades the bride in a traditional Chinese wedding, multiplied into a field of canopies over the seating. The bamboo folding chairs carry white cushions embroidered with round medallions of red blossoms on dark branches, a composition lifted straight from Chinese bird and flower painting, and those red stitches are the strongest color in the ceremony decor.

Hadley Newton, a close friend of the couple, led the ceremony, and Brian broke the glass to close it, the Jewish tradition that turns the final second of a wedding into its loudest. Liany’s bouquet mixed white and peach blooms with long white strands trailing almost to the ground, so it moved with her during the recessional while a violinist played the couple back up the aisle.

Moments Together

Dias de Vino y Rosas shot much of the weekend on film and kept the black borders of the negatives in the final scans, light leaks included. The couple portraits happened in the olive groves and along a fence of rough branches, with Brian in dark sunglasses and Liany’s veil lifted by the wind. Wedding BFF handled content creation, so the weekend also exists at phone speed.

Cocktail hour opened with a welcome drink station set beside a braided palm basket heaped with lemons, under a framed sign illustrated with more of them. Citrus is about as Mallorcan as it gets, with the Sóller valley growing oranges and lemons for generations, so the welcome table speaks the local language before anyone takes a sip.

Overhead, white paper lanterns in mixed sizes hang on strings of lights across the courtyard, Chinese lanterns stripped of their usual red so they slip into the ivory and blush palette and keep glowing long after sunset.

Reception

Dinner happened at long tables dressed in ivory linen, and Piel de Mango kept the flowers low and loose so faces stayed visible from one side to the other. The palette is the blossom motif in full bloom: peach stock, white garden roses, pink tulips and sprays of waxflower in ceramic bowls, with tall taper candles, gold flatware and gold rimmed glassware filling the gaps. Small oranges sit loose between the arrangements, and in Cantonese the word for mandarin sounds like the word for luck, which gives the fruit a second job at this table.

The napkins are printed with birds and flowering branches in the chinoiserie style, Europe’s 18th century fantasy of China, and on a table set for a Chinese bride the reference flips into something closer to reclaiming it. Each menu is tied with a red Chinese knot and tassel, the boldest heritage marker on the table and the strongest red in the room.

The paper suite came from Three Strands Stationery, designed by Liany’s sister, with blossom illustrations running through it and the Chinese character for luck worked into the design. Tot a Punt handled catering and drinks, a natural brief for a team that specializes in Mediterranean cooking and a couple who chose the island for its food.

The signature cocktails were an Espresso Martini and a Moscow Mule, painted in watercolor on the bar sign next to bundles of paper straws and dried orange wheels. Later the party moved into a vaulted stone room where LoMusic ran the music, and Liany switched into a white set from Marlies Grace with a cropped top and wide leg trousers, the tulle sleeves from her ceremony look still on underneath.

Dessert came from La Oca Margarita, whose macaron tower climbs from pink at the base through peach and mint to cream at the top, a pastel cousin of the French croquembouche color coded to the blossom palette of the whole weekend.