Hailey Baldwin Bieber and Justin Bieber: The Off-White Wedding That Made the Veil the Main Event

Hailey Baldwin and Justin Bieber had technically been married for a year before they had their wedding.

The couple quietly married at a New York courthouse in September 2018, then waited until the following year for the full celebration: chapel, guests, several dresses and one absolutely enormous veil.

On September 30, 2019, they gathered family and friends at Montage Palmetto Bluff in South Carolina for the ceremony most people now think of as the Bieber wedding.

And visually, almost everything came back to Hailey’s custom Off-White gown by Virgil Abloh.

A second wedding in South Carolina

Justin and Hailey chose Montage Palmetto Bluff, a secluded resort outside Savannah, for their religious wedding celebration.

Celebrity wedding planner Mindy Weiss organised the weekend, which brought together around 150 guests including Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Usher, Jaden Smith, Joan Smalls and members of Hailey’s Baldwin family.

The result was considerably less low-key than the courthouse ceremony.

As it should have been.

The Virgil Abloh wedding dress

From the beginning, Hailey knew she wanted Virgil Abloh to design her ceremony gown for Off-White.

That choice was interesting precisely because Off-White was not a traditional bridal house.

The finished gown was unmistakably bridal — long sleeves, lace, a fitted silhouette, dramatic train — but it also carried the graphic language associated with Abloh’s work.

The dress sat off the shoulders and featured lace embroidery, a plunging back and sleeves extending over the hands.

It was romantic without suddenly pretending Hailey had become a different person for her wedding day.

Which is probably why it worked.

And then there was the veil

The veil became almost as famous as the dress itself.

It extended dramatically behind Hailey and carried the words:

“TILL DEATH DO US PART”

embroidered along the hem in quotation marks — pure Virgil Abloh.

It was bridal tradition filtered through streetwear graphics, and there was absolutely no possibility of mistaking it for anybody else’s wedding veil.

Ten people reportedly worked on the dress, with another ten involved in creating the veil.

Subtle, then.

No complaints from me.

Traditional dress, very untraditional details

What makes the gown interesting years later is the tension between those two things.

Strip away the typography and it is actually a very classic lace wedding dress.

But Abloh inserted small Off-White signatures throughout it, giving something conventional a very specific identity.

That is much more effective than designing something strange simply because the bride is famous.

Hailey still looked unmistakably like a bride.

She just looked like Hailey’s version of one.

The groom wore Celine

Justin wore a black Celine suit designed by Hedi Slimane.

Against Hailey’s elaborate lace gown and cathedral-scale veil, the clean black tailoring was exactly enough.

There are moments when the groom’s principal fashion responsibility is simply not to interfere.

Mission accomplished.

One wedding dress was obviously not enough

Hailey changed several times over the course of the celebration.

After the Off-White ceremony gown, she wore additional bridal looks including a custom Vera Wang slip dress and a Ralph & Russo look for the later festivities.

The Vera Wang dress was deliberately lighter and more sensual, with a much freer silhouette designed for dancing rather than processing solemnly down an aisle.

Which is sensible.

Nobody needs to be managing a cathedral veil at 1 a.m.

The celebrity guest list

The wedding was predictably full of familiar faces.

Kendall Jenner attended, as did Kylie Jenner, Kris Jenner, Corey Gamble, Joan Smalls, Jaden Smith and other friends from the couple’s fashion and music circles.

Hailey’s sister Alaia Baldwin and cousin Ireland Baldwin were among her bridesmaids.

It was less royal family tree and more extremely well-dressed Instagram feed.

Again: appropriate.

The reception

The celebration continued with live performances, dancing and a reception filled with personalised details.

Daniel Caesar and Dan + Shay performed, and Justin even revived One Less Lonely Girl for his bride during the festivities.

There was also a five-tier wedding cake, crystal-covered bottles and the sort of late-night energy one would expect when a pop star gets married surrounded by several hundred famous friends.

Why the wedding still stands out

Celebrity weddings from the late 2010s can already begin to blur together: white flowers, giant tent, designer gown, famous guests, repeat.

Hailey’s does not.

And almost entirely because of the fashion.

The Off-White dress immediately fixes the wedding in a particular moment in fashion history.

Virgil Abloh took symbols associated with streetwear and placed them onto one of the most traditional garments imaginable.

The result should perhaps have looked gimmicky.

Instead, it became one of the defining celebrity wedding looks of the decade.

The RCW verdict

I a

m not going to pretend the veil was understated.

It contained a sentence.

But restraint is not the only route to good bridal fashion.

Sometimes a wedding look works because the bride commits completely to the idea.

Hailey wanted Virgil Abloh. She wanted Off-White. She wanted something recognisably bridal that still belonged to her own fashion world.

And she got exactly that.

If you are going to put words on a wedding veil, you may as well make them twenty feet long.