As featured on Vogue
Orginal Feature: www.vogue.com
Photo: Aaron Delesie
Event Planner: Sugokuii Events, Diana Sorensen
Feiping Chang, an Instagram fashion star and the founder of the lifestyle website xoxoFei.com, and financier Lincoln Li’s wedding was over three days in June. It all started with a welcome dinner at the well-known restaurant Da Paolino in Capri, Italy, on the 15th. An all-day seaside party at Conca del Sogno in Nerano commenced the next morning, and then the main event was on the final day of the meticulously planned destination wedding weekend. But before the stunning Amalfi Coast setting had been decided upon, the multiple custom Giambattista Valli dresses commissioned and designed, and the hashtag populated with more than 500 posts, there was a meet cute in Myanmar.
We kick-started the festivities with the rehearsal dinner at Da Paolino Restaurant, famous for its canopy of lemon trees. My dress was custom designed by one of my best friends, Harris Chan of Moiselle, and the fabric was hand-painted with lemons and lemon flowers with Lincoln’s name and mine entwined.
Our planner, Diana Sorensen of Sugokuii Events, created this fun lemon fruit stand which functioned as the table placement display as well as a fun photo booth. The lemon stand was custom designed with many details to resemble ones typically seen in the Amalfi Coast. Guests found their names and seats on tambourines, limoncello bottles, vintage signage, hand-painted Amalfi plates and fruit baskets, with our wedding hashtag on top illuminated using festive southern Italian luminarie.
We chose Da Paolino for our rehearsal dinner as it feels so quintessentially Capri and is the perfect welcome for our guests, many of whom flew in all the way from Hong Kong or Australia. We covered the trunks of the lemon trees with bougainvillea and hung yellow hand-blown glass bulbs that looked beautiful against the lemons and greenery.
In line with the theme of the rehearsal night, each guest had their own antique Capri tile with their name calligraphed that they could bring home as a memento.
My ceremony dress was custom Giambattista Valli haute couture. The dress was brought straight from his Paris atelier to Capri and took four men to hand-carry it on two luggage carts up to the villa
This is one of my favorite shots from the wedding. The flowers in the main entry of the villa covered the walls and lined up the stairs through the hallway. We wanted the flowers to feel like they had been growing wildly inside the villa for years. It’s a lot of flowers and a lot of dress, but somehow, complemented each other perfectly.
This was us on the way up to the mountaintop to our ceremony venue—Villa Lysis, a historical monument with a deeply romantic story. As the villa is usually only accessible by foot, we were given special permission by the local government office to utilize traditional luggage carts that we completely transformed with built-in sofas and canopies to take our guests up. Along the way, local Scialapopolo folk groups in traditional costumes were stationed at various areas—some were playing music, others were greeting our guests on the carts with trays of limoncello—and we decorated most of the shops and restaurants along the way up with special signage in order to make the ride up as personalized and fun as possible. The entire upper part of the island was cheering for us and all 140 guests as we headed up, and I’ll never forget the hospitality and warmth of the people of Capri!
The ceremony took place in the gardens of Villa Lysis, facing the sea with an incredible view of Capri. We didn’t want a typical setup with a ceremony arch. Instead, we wrapped the tree trunks of all the surrounding trees in white peonies and this naturally “framed” the view for our ceremony.
We draped the facade of the villa in white and lilac delphinium. We wanted it to feel luscious yet natural to the environment, and enhance the already spectacular architecture and enchanting environment.
This is the rooftop of the villa, which just two weeks earlier had never been used before and was quite worn down (the villa was built in 1905 by a French count). We retiled the entire floor and added a white pergola covered in an assortment of pastel florals in order to create a beautiful wild garden feel. Velvet upholstered sofas in pale rose were placed around the perimeter of the rooftop (which guests danced on later in the evening). We used white chairs on the other side, which balanced everything out really well. The tables were also custom built with a brass edge framing each side to tie into our tablescape, and flowers cascaded all along the tables and onto the floor.
This was my dream tablescape, it felt romantic, whimsical, and paid homage to Italian craftsmanship. The pink chargers were from Laboratorio Paravicini and had our initials painted onto them. The white plates are from a Roman ceramic studio and each had different textures and rims that complemented each other. The bread plates were rose quartz slabs that we had cut to size and painted gold on the edges. Instead of place cards, we had a local pastry chef in Capri create these incredibly intricate edible flowers and leaves made from sugar.
During the reception on the rooftop, the ground floor of the villa was transformed into a dessert room filled with every imaginable southern Italian dessert created by Capri Palace. There was an abundance of fresh cannoli, babà, torta Caprese, and so much more—this was definitely one of the most popular spots for our guests during the night!
The song for our first dance was “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Elvin Bishop, performed by our friend Geoffrey Chuang. Towards the end of his performance, confetti canons went off and covered the entire space in a flurry of white and gold as we danced into the night.
