Bonnie & Clyde Inspired Joshua Tree Elopement

Jay Noir

May 11, 2017

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Mia and Jay wanted to do something completely different for their wedding, so they eloped in Joshua Tree, with just the them, a friend to officiate the ceremony and another to take the pictures. In fact, these photos look like something out of a fashion editorial shoot rather than a real wedding don’t you think!?

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After the ceremony, they buried a time capsule to commemorate the day. “We wanted to tell our story with our wedding, The Desert Noir Story (our surname is Noir)”, said Mia. “We knew we wanted to have a time capsule that contained trinkets of the past six years including our written vows and letters we’d written each other. We will come back in say, 20 years, to dig it up and we won’t know what the letters say until then! We wanted to come up with a creative story around it for the photos, so we shot it like we were burying something we’d stolen from a heist at a bank! Our overall inspiration was Bonnie & Clyde, dark moody colours, and film noir.”

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They didn’t have any flowers or decor as there was no formal reception, but they did have black macrons made by The Happy Belly Bakery. Mia wore an incredible one-of-a-kind caped, sequin romper. “I had a vision and that vision didn’t include me in a dress”, she said. “For most who know me, I don’t think it’s a huge shock! I knew I wanted a long sleeved something, and then I realised it needed to be a romper… with a cape, a sequined cape!”

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“I found designer Yasmine Layani on Etsy. Her dresses are beautiful. With my vision, we co-designed my dream ensemble and Yasmine made it. It was crazy because she’s in Tel Aviv and we live in Chicago, so we didn’t ever meet, but we would video chat about fabric choices and the progress she was making.”

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“Even though we eloped we still had people with lots of opinions and thoughts about how we SHOULD do things for OUR day. I wish we’d known this would have happened before we started planning. We discovered that people are more traditional in thinking than sometimes they, themselves even know. However we are glad we trusted our vision. It was the right thing to do because our wedding was our own.”

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