The Alice in Wonderland Wedding With a Tattoo Bar

Madeline and Leonard wanted a wedding that could hold two moods at once, the reverent and the ridiculous, and they handed that brief to Birch Design Studio. Principal Marina Birch trained in art history and interiors and treats every event as a production staged in acts, which is exactly the sensibility a surrealist wedding needs. Across one May night in Chicago the studio moved 308 guests from an ivory chapel into a room where cantaloupes worked as lamps and the father of the bride built a giant eye to watch the afterparty. The couple spent a year and a half building it with Jessica at Birch Design Studio, who translated a private sense of humor into a coherent visual language that stayed as considered as it was strange.

Location: Chicago, United States
Style: Surrealist, Playful, Maximal
Time of planning: 1.5 year
Number of guests: 308
Setting: Hotel Ballroom
Season: Spring

Madeline moved to New York in 2018 with a rule she took seriously, never turn down a first date, and after five years of setups she leaned into the joke and set her Hinge prompt to read “Together we could … Get married.” Leonard, a first year law student in the night program at Brooklyn Law working full days, swiped in her favor, met her at Bookclub in the East Village at 9 PM on a Tuesday, and gave the date exactly one hour before he checked his watch and called it.

He has a theory that a first date which runs long is like an overripe banana, better a beat early while there is still something to wonder about. A year and a half later he proposed in Big Sur, a picnic that turned out to be a persimmon, a bag of pistachios, and a photographer waiting on a cliff, before flying both families to Los Angeles to ambush the celebration.

Bride's Morning & Fashion

Madeline shopped the way decisive people do, tried on roughly ten dresses, and stopped the moment she found the one she wanted. The gown came from Enaura through The Wedding Atelier, and what sold her was its structure, a built architecture rather than anything soft or floaty.

Robert Noia Style dressed her, Bianca Sansosti Artistry did hair and makeup, and the one deliberate jolt of color sat at her feet: red Roger Vivier shoes, a house her mother has always loved. Her jewelry ran on lineage instead of receipts, vintage Judith Ripka earrings from Leonard’s grandmother and a bracelet borrowed from his mother, so she carried his family before she carried his name

She has called the first look her favorite part of the day, the walk down the stairs toward Leonard waiting at the bottom, heart going. For the afterparty she changed into the Blair dress by KHAITE, all sheer top and purposeful mischief, and she chose it with an insider’s eye, since she works for the label. Her bridesmaids moved in green, dresses from Dessy cut in different styles but held together by one shared fabric and shade, which read as a group without reading as a uniform.

Groom’s Fashion

Leonard’s tuxedo was custom Michael Andrews Bespoke in Loro Piana cloth, and the details on it amounted to a small surrealist cabinet in their own right. A feathered Brackish bow tie, the same one his brother wore to get married, sat under his grandmother’s dragonfly brooch.

Vintage Tiffany studs shaped like tiger heads were a wedding day gift from Madeline’s parents, his grandfather’s gold cufflinks carried the family crest, and his Christian Louboutin shoes hid the reception’s other flash of red on their soles. The insects and big cats on his lapel were not an accident, since Leonard’s real tattoos, the permanent ones that read like stickers, became the whole reason for one of the night’s best ideas later on.

Ceremony

The day itself unfolded inside a Chicago hotel Madeline had known since childhood, the neighborhood where she spent school breaks and where her family still keeps an apartment down the street. Although the couple lives in New York, she wanted everyone she loved sleeping under one roof and running into each other in the hallways all weekend, a homebody’s idea of grand staged at the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago.

The ceremony was the one act stripped of color. Birch Design Studio and Life in Bloom kept it to ivory alone, lush draping and banks of candles, so the room played as a chapel before the surrealism was allowed in. Guests entered through a draped tunnel lined with musicians on pedestals, Aragon Artists working an electric violin into something processional, which set the angelic tone Madeline wanted for the top of the night.

Under the chuppah the couple skipped traditional vows in favor of what they called Nice words, and Leonard’s were spare enough that guests were calling him Hemingway on the way out. Madeline’s cousin sang the blessings alongside the rabbi, a Sephardic and Ashkenazi household joining in real time, and Madeline walked in flanked by both parents, which she has named the closest rival to the first look.

Two Midwesterners, one from the Chicago suburbs and one from Detroit, took the long way to that chuppah. Madeline had asked Leonard to marry her mid conversation on their very first date, he answered with silence, and a woman eavesdropping at the next table had to reassure him afterward that the night had gone well. They did not kiss until the third or fourth date and paced everything from there, on the belief that love is a marathon. The question Madeline once blurted over a dating app took a year and a half of dating and another of planning to become the real thing.

Reception

After the ceremony the dial started turning. Cocktail hour introduced the first of the strange florals against moody lighting from Luxe Productions, with a saxophone from Aragon Artists carrying the room, the deliberate second act in a night the couple designed to get quirkier as it went. Alisha Tova photographed all of it, and her portraits leaned into the same draped fabric that ran through the whole build, wrapping the couple the way Christo once wrapped buildings. Circle Dot Weddings caught it in motion.

"I wanted our guests to feel like they were caught somewhere between wonderland and a Dali painting."

Madeline, the bride

The reception was the payoff, the room where Madeline wanted guests hit with centerpieces that offered endless entertainment for the eye. Life in Bloom built them mostly from produce, cantaloupes rigged into working lamps, anthurium and poppies and amaranthus standing in for the usual roses, and no two tables designed alike.

A cantaloupe made to glow is a direct descendant of the Surrealist object, the Dali lobster telephone school of taking something edible and handing it a job it was never meant to have, with a little Alice in Wonderland logic about food that refuses to behave. Arrange enough fruit into a composition and you also land somewhere between Arcimboldo and a Dutch still life, which is precisely the double reading the couple were after.

The table settings carried the same handmade obsession. Madeline hand painted every guest’s name onto a vintage plate her mother had hunted down on, set against vintage silver her mother also sourced, so each place setting doubled as a favor guests took home. Her stationery from Blacker and Kooby stayed classic on purpose, then she overrode the restraint with rubber stamps she designed herself, hand stamping the invitations and the escort cards. A graphic design background will do that, turn a wedding into a portfolio nobody asked for but everybody kept.

The bar ran his and hers, a Negroni for Madeline and an alcohol free spritz for Leonard, printed as Mad’s and Len’s. Dinner leaned into spectacle with a live action sushi station and a fried rice bar. The cake was gluten free banana, with a chocolate version alongside for anyone unwilling to commit to the gluten free bit, and it wore the cake topper from Madeline’s Bubby and Zayde’s wedding. A banana cake from the man who once compared a good date to a banana eaten at the right moment is either a coincidence or the most committed joke at the party.

The send off details kept the childhood deli energy going, smiley face cookies to close the night, plus hats Leonard printed for guests off the graphics Madeline made for the weekend. The bathroom stocked napkins reading Officially Gross, which is what Madeline becomes the second she takes Leonard’s surname. Best of all was the tattoo bar, a working temporary tattoo station stocked with replicas of Leonard’s real ink, so guests could leave wearing his tattoos without the lifelong contract. A tattoo artist on the guest list is the Gen Z answer to the sparkler exit, a favor that survives the cab home.

Then the night handed itself over to Madeline’s father. He built a giant moving eyeball for the afterparty, the single most surreal object in a wedding built on surrealism, and it is hard to overstate how much that eye meant to her. It reads across three references at once, the giant eye Dali designed for the dream sequence in Spellbound, Magritte’s False Mirror, and the protective evil eye that a Sephardic bride carries in her cultural memory. A projection wall handled the rest of the afterparty’s altered reality.

Aragon Artists ran the music as a DJ and band hybrid built around an electric violin and a saxophone, and the room turned over to Israeli music once the hora got going. The first dance was Tree House by Alex G, the song Madeline and Leonard wore out on their first trip together, an indie choice that tells you which corner of the internet raised them.

The real ambush came from Madeline’s father again, who secretly wrote the couple an original dance track, cued the entire room to flood the floor the second it dropped, and let his daughter and new son find out in real time. That is the whole thesis of the wedding, the serious and the silly refusing to sit at separate tables.The couple took the surrealism to ground afterward in Sicily, Taormina into the Aeolian Islands into Noto, which is about as close to a Dali landscape as a honeymoon gets.