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The Wedding Is One Day. The Marriage Is For Life.

Our Wedding Editor on her three day wedding weekend in the South of France, and the one thing she would tell every Bride before anything else.

Claudia Judd October 2, 2026 7 Min Read

I got married on 12th September, in front of 127 of the people I love most. I have spent the best part of a year planning that weekend down to the last detail, and now that it has actually happened, there is one thing I would tell every Bride before I told her anything else.

The wedding is just a day. Or three, in our case. We built the weekend as Friday, Saturday, Sunday: linens and cocktail dresses for Friday night, black tie for the wedding itself on Saturday, and swim on Sunday, everyone still there, still together, just in the pool instead of on the dance floor. Three very different days. Your marriage is for life.

The Wedding Is One Day. The Marriage Is For Life.

The start line, not the finish line

I do not say that to take anything away from the planning. I loved the planning. I loved the fittings, the supplier calls, the moodboards, even the 170 page canva document I built to hold it all together. But somewhere in the middle of it, I realised I had spent months treating the Saturday as the finish line, when actually it was the start line. Everything before it was preparation. Everything after it is the actual thing.

That shift changed how I looked at almost every decision that followed.

It changed the last six months of planning completely. It stopped being about getting everything right and started being about making it personal. I wanted everyone at that wedding to look around at some point and think, this is just them.

A journey, not a venue

I wanted every part of the weekend to happen somewhere different, so that for our guests it felt like a journey rather than three days in the same spot.

Friday night was relaxed, in the back garden under the trees by some of the guest gites. Soft white and green flowers, standing tables and sofas to sink into, and me in a backless tassel dress with half of the trees in it by the end. Nobody saw the ceremony space that night, which kept a little of the excitement back for Saturday.

Saturday's ceremony was on the grass in front of a fountain, and BudFlora, a florist I have known for years, built the flowers into the fountain itself. Everything was white. My bridesmaids all wore the same dress but each carried a different bouquet, and together those separate florals made up mine. John wore a single deep red rose on his jacket, with the same rose tucked into my bouquet, a hint of what was still to come.

Cocktail hour moved to a little courtyard with mural tiles on the walls. A cocktail bar, where I was insistent on spicy margaritas, the roaming band for part of it, and our initials on the stirrers, napkins and cocktail doilies.

Dinner was somewhere new again, and this is where the deep red came in. Lights strung overhead, candles flickering, a completely different mood. It was the first time all weekend I really looked out and took it all in.

After dinner I changed into a sheer sequin column dress and we moved into the tent for the afterparty, which gave us exactly the Glasto after hours feeling we wanted.

Sunday was the pool, and different again. A pizza van, an ice cream station, yellow and white striped branding and a friend DJing poolside, with me in my personalised Gigi & Olive swimsuit and sarong. It gave everyone the chance to recap the night before, and for some, one more glass of champagne to keep going.

We pulled all of this off without a planner, which meant a lot of information for our guests to keep track of across six different spaces and three days. If you are planning without one, or even if you have one, I would recommend Gather. Having the itinerary, dress codes and every detail your guests need in one place saves you answering the same question a hundred times.

The details that were only ours

Every detail went through the same test. Would someone look at it and think, that is so them.

My veil was made with our wedding date and both our initials worked into it, a piece I want to pass down and one day see carrying someone else's initials alongside ours.

Our confetti came from a petal bar, with petals dried from our Cheshire wedding, lavender from my family's garden in France and rose petals sent over from Australia, so guests could build their own cone and both weddings ended up in the same handful.

Our CJ logo went on everything, right down to the rosé ice luge.

During the ceremony we did a warming of the rings, with our Queensmith rings passed between our guests so everyone had held them before we did. We also built advice from our family and friends into the ceremony itself, so the words came from the people who know us best.

To get into the afterparty tent, everyone needed a club stamp. Our favours were tattoos. And for the pool day, personalised plastic cups and napkins, because even a Sunday by the pool deserved the details.

The morning, in Gigi & Olive

My three bridesmaids were with me from 9am, two in hair and makeup at a time, with pastries, mimosas and a playlist built around a song for each of us.

Before anyone got dressed, I gave each of them a letter, written on our A Letter To My Bridesmaid paper. It was the quietest few minutes of the morning, and the part that set the tone for everything after it.

For hair and makeup I wore our Esme Long Robe, personalised with Mrs Edmunds. Practical as much as pretty, since it slipped easily off my shoulders whenever my makeup artist needed to work bronzer across my chest. For the photographs, I changed into the Adele Top and Shorts Set, one of the most beautiful pieces I own.

And in the September heat, our embroidered linen fan never left my hand.

The moment I keep coming back to

The moment I keep coming back to happened partway through dinner, when the roaming band reappeared and John and I ended up dancing on our chairs, looking out at everyone at once. My granddad, eighty years old, up and dancing. Friends John had met travelling years ago, stood next to girlfriends I had lived with at university, all of them together in one room because of us. It is the kind of moment you do not fully take in in the seconds it is happening, you are too busy living it, and I have only really appreciated how surreal it was in the days since.

If I am honest, the thing I keep coming back to is how little any of it had to do with how the days looked. It had everything to do with how it felt to be there, and who I got to marry in the middle of it.

So if you are somewhere in the middle of your own planning right now, buried in a decision that feels enormous: it probably is not. Make the choice, book the supplier, pick the flowers, and then put the energy you have left into the thing that actually lasts. The days will be beautiful. They will also be over by Monday. The marriage is the part you get to keep.

This is the first piece in a short series on how the weekend actually came together, the planning document that ran it, the dress or five, and everything I would tell another Bride now that it is done.

Explore Queensmith and Gather on The Directory.