This Bride’s Standing Ground Wedding Dress Was Inspired By Burmese Royalty
Oftentimes, you meet The One when it’s the most inconvenient. That was certainly the case for Phway Su Aye, founder of the modern fragrance house, Gabar, whose first date with husband-to-be Johannes Loefstrand took place just days before she was heading to Lisbon with the plan of moving there. “I didn’t have any intention for it to get serious,” she jokes now. “I had worn a full-on puffer jacket from head to toe, no make-up, and only a spritz of fragrance – Gabar’s 02 Ground if I remember correctly. But we hit it off immediately and just talked for hours. It felt as if we were two long lost friends reuniting after a long time apart.”
Portugal continued to play an important role in the couple’s relationship: it was the site of their third date (“For most people, a third date of that nature probably wouldn’t have made a lot of sense, but we felt so comfortable with each other from the get-go that it all just flowed so naturally,” she remembers), as well as their proposal and wedding. “He picked this beautiful, secluded beach by the hotel that we were staying at, Areias Do Seixo on the West Coast of Portugal,” she recalls of the proposal. “After a massage, I went to the beach to meet him at sunset and he was standing so sweetly on a bench waving with a picnic basket in his hands. That’s when I started to clock things. We walked all the way down to the beach side, and magically everybody that was there disappeared and there was just this lone fisherman left as the sun was setting over the Atlantic.”
The lone fisherman ended up taking their engagement photos, and they spent the entire weekend soaking it all in, with Johannes relaying how he’d planned the proposal over the past few months with help from Phway’s nearest and dearest. “The ring he designed was absolutely beautiful and exactly what I would have created, if given the choice,” she says. “He worked personally with Shoreditch-based jewellery designer Rachel Boston to create a five-diamond stone Art Deco ring, incorporating his late grandmother’s jewellery, but recasting it into rose gold to complete the look, as well as including our birthstones on the inside of the ring.”
The couple chose to plan the wedding themselves as they knew they wanted to keep things small, and had already settled on Portugal as the location. “When we first started looking for a venue, we knew we wanted to make the entire celebration feel a lot more like a big family and friend holiday than a traditional wedding,” shares Phway. “Therefore, we focused on finding a venue that would feel most like a holiday home, while having the beauty and uniqueness of a venue to host in. Terra Rosa in Braga was exactly that.”
As a fuss-free bride, Phway considered renting her dress, but after trying several on she realised that they didn’t feel quite like her. A few months into the process, she was looking at Michael Stewart Dunne’s work for Standing Ground on Instagram, and felt a strong urge to start a conversation with him. “I’d always been mesmerised by his striking and elegant custom eveningwear,” she shares. Over the course of the next eight months, they worked closely together on the gown, which Phway wanted made out of jersey, as it was both figure-hugging and comfortable. “Michael also wanted to keep Standing Ground’s iconic beading and embellishments front and centre, with details across the drape line of the skirt, which gave it a futuristic feel,” she adds. They decided to incorporate a long scarf into the look, rather than a traditional veil, and also added a modern, asymmetrical element with one of the arms covered and the other not. “With its fishtail and sweeping lines, it ended up paying amazing homage to traditional Burmese royal wear and also ended up feeling like a blend of East meets West.”
When it came to accessories, Phway kept things minimal to allow the dress to be the centrepiece. “I wore a thin diamond hand chain and necklace passed down by my late Burmese grandmother, who had passed away only a few months earlier,” she says. “I also wore a small diamond ring gifted to me by a friend and bridesmaid from her father’s jewellery studio Sarkisian’s in New York – an ode to my 10 years spent there before London.” Her shoes were nude petal heels from Mercedes Castillo. “I wanted to make the look seem almost barefooted,” she recalls.
