Desyrée Nicole and Gabriella Paulino were surprised by all the tears at their wedding. “We both were in shambles,” Desyrée confesses. “You don’t think you’re going to cry because we’ve been together so long...I cried [from] morning to night.” The Italian celebration was held a decade to the day after the pair first met. “We met in 2014 and then been inseparable ever since,” she adds.
Both Desyrée and Gabriella work for Todd Patrick, the menswear line that Desyrée founded, which is named after her brother. Gabriella is the COO, while Desyrée, who appeared on the show Next in Fashion, is the creative director. Desyrée designed her wedding suit, which she made sure coordinated with Gabriella’s dress. She also made 13 custom suits for friends, the officiant, and several of her NFL player clients.
“I started the process three months before the wedding,” Desyrée says. “Every single person that ordered a custom, I designed it with them. I let everyone have that creative freedom and collaborated on their suit for that day. I thought that was pretty cool.” She even flew around the country to take each person’s measurements to make sure everything fit impeccably.
The intimate 60-person wedding took place at a villa that Desyrée and Gabriella fell in love with at first sight. While many couples don’t wait 10 years to marry, that made things all the more special. They got a wedding that truly fit their story. “Since the beginning, we didn’t want this over-the-top wedding,” Gabriella explains. “We wanted something really simple and intimate, and I think the outcome was honestly perfect.”
The Location
Gabriella and Desyrée love Italy and have been to Florence four times. “We wanted people to come somewhere where they were like, ‘Dang, this is so different than what we’re used to,’ and they’ll remember that as a part of their experience,” Desyrée says. “We wanted that to be tied to our wedding memory, somewhere that we actually love to go and don’t have any bad things to say about it.”
The Welcome Party
They kicked things off with a cocktail party at a bar that was about 30 minutes from where most guests were staying. It was difficult to find parking, so the couple arrived a bit late, when things were already well underway. Gabriella wore a dress from Abercrombie (“I’m like, ‘Okay. Come back, Abercrombie,’” Desyrée says), while Desyrée wore Zara.
The Venue
The couple was thrilled to find Villa Monsoglio in Tuscany. “We always had the idea to do it in Italy. That we already knew. I think the most tedious part for us was finding a villa,” Gabriella says. “Everything else after that was super easy. The food, the plates ,and all of that other stuff was just like, ‘Oh yeah, we know we like this,’ and we were always on the same page.”
“You think about the pictures and what you want the experience to look like, so the villa was probably the most important,” Desyrée says. The planning process was made simple by their wedding planner, Sandro Poli. They admittedly didn’t imagine having a male planner, but it turns out he was perfect. “He was so eager to meet us and he was so kind and sweet,” Gabriella says. “When he brought his husband out to meet us, we were like, ‘Oh my God, we love you already.”
The couple stayed at a nearby villa, along with 35 of their guests. “That helped everybody get familiar and comfortable with each other. Usually the couple has to go around the wedding and say hello to everybody, but a lot of work was eliminated for us because we had seen people already,” Gabriella says.
Getting Ready
There was no bridal party; both brides wanted to get ready with a really small group. “We did our own hair. We just didn’t want it to be this thing where we had so many people that we weren’t really close to in a space for this intimate moment,” Desyrée says. “We made everything super intimate, with under 60 guests. We wanted the whole day to be a blending of families.”
The Looks
Gabriella wore a dress from NEWHITE, designed by Juliette Kim. She tried it on in Atlanta for the first time but wound up getting it directly from the brand in what was a very straight-forward process. Desyrée designed her own Todd Patrick suit, which had a double-breasted, single-button jacket and a wide-leg pant. She matched the fabric to Gabriella’s gown.
Desyrée’s favorite moment of the whole day was the first look. “I started crying, not even from seeing her, but [hearing] the click-clack of the heels, because I knew she was going to tap me,” she says.
The Ceremony
Guests, all of whom wore black, were given a glass of champagne as they sat down. The wedding was officiated by Bennie Fowler, a former NFL player and close friend of the couple. (Other guests in the sports world included Jourdan Lewis, a cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys, Cameron Jordan, a defensive end for the New Orleans Saints, former Jets player Muhammad Wilkerson, and Taybor Pepper, a long snapper for the San Francisco 49ers.) Desyrée entered with her mother and father, followed by Gabriella and her father. They recall the ceremony going by much more quickly than they had expected. “I don’t know the exact [way] to describe it; I guess you’re anticipating what you're about to do, but it’s not nerves—it’s this happy, overwhelming feeling,” Desyrée recalls. “We both were in shambles. [We didn’t] think we were going to cry because we’ve been together so long.”
The Dinner
When Gabriella looks back, the dinner stands out to her. “It was literally exactly what I wanted, the long table with all the candles in the middle,” she says. The dinner was served family-style. “We wanted it to feel casual, like a dinner party instead of a wedding reception.”
“I’m like, ‘Whoever can make me fried chicken, that’s who we’re going to go with,’” Desyrée says of the catering options. “They guaranteed me they were going to make this chicken the right way. Man, they did not. They did not, but I was in such a happy mood that it was like, ‘Why would I be so upset over chicken if everything else was perfect?’ The food was actually really good.”
The Party
Jordss, a friend of the couple, is a professional DJ in London and set the mood on the dance floor. “She sped up the pace towards the end of the dinner to get everyone ready to dance, and it was actually fire,” Gabriella says. Their first song was “Mine” by Alex Isley and Jack Dine.
It meant a lot to Gabriella and Desyrée to get married on their 10th anniversary. “There was something about us building a life together and running our companies together and building these things that we’ve invested our time and energy to,” Desyrée says. “It was all about timing.”
Desyrée Nicole and Gabriella Paulino’s Wedding
Adrienne Gaffney is a features editor at ELLE and previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.
