1 week Ago By Kerry McDermott
In the days leading up to her wedding, set to take place on a Moroccan rooftop at sunset in the unpredictable month of November, Constance Barnwell was praying not to the weather gods, but to Yves Saint Laurent . The venue was Villa Mabrouka in Tangier, once the coastal retreat of the legendary couturier and his partner Pierre Bergé, now a tiny jewel of a boutique hotel steeped in all the glamour of a bygone era. Perhaps its late owner was listening.
“We were so bloody lucky,” says the bride, who is the co-creative director of Charlotte Tilbury. “It was not the prime time of year for Tangier, but we had this amazing crushed velvet purple sky.” As the couple exchanged vows, the bride’s brother sang “Into My Arms” – the house piano having been hoisted onto the roof for the occasion – and birds in murmuration swooped overhead.
If it sounds like a fantasy, Barnwell confesses that, not so very long ago, she might have struggled to imagine it herself. She recalls a bleak January morning in 2023 when, following a particularly dispiriting spell of Hinge dating (a “phantasmagorical journey of boggarts and trolls”, as she puts it), she rang a psychic. “He said, ‘You’re going to be engaged by the end of the year to someone called Tom, and he’s on the TV.
’” A month later, Constance and Tom Cheshire – a Sky News correspondent – both swiped right. “When he popped up on my Hinge and I saw his name and his job, being the sort of person I am – your archetypal creative, probably – I was like, ‘Well, that’s him!’ We met and fell in love, and the rest is history.” The couple had their first date in March, and that December Tom proposed during a Christmas Eve walk on a moody Isle of Wight.
“It was not walking weather, it was like Wuthering Heights ,” says the bride, who nonetheless had a sneaking suspicion the big moment might be imminent. “He was acting quite sheepish,” she says, laughing. “Plus, I had been doing some light hinting around how much I love Jessica McCormack jewellery.
..” The couple first tied the knot in London at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace (scene of many a Cambridge family Christening ), a “fabulously grand option” that arose via the groom’s father.
“That was smaller – just family,” says Constance, who wore a custom dress and veil by The Own Studio with pink Saint Laurent shoes for the ceremony. But the plan was always to throw an unforgettable party for all of their friends, and given that Tom (who was previously Sky’s Asia correspondent) and Constance’s international guests would be travelling from as far afield as LA, Beijing, Pakistan and Utah, a destination wedding made sense. And so, to Morocco, after Constance’s “Googling rampage” led her to Villa Mabrouka – now owned by the designer Jasper Conran, who is also behind L’Hotel in Marrakech – and Tangier, the louche port city whose irresistibly naughty reputation prompted Anthony Bourdain to christen it a “station of the cross for the bad boys of culture”.
Needless to say, it lent itself perfectly to a three-day wedding bacchanal, kicking off with welcome drinks in the medina at Palais Akaaboune, and culminating in a Slim Aarons-esque pool party to stave off the hangover. “Villa Mabrouka is just so beautiful, it’s beyond. Like stepping into a 1960s Norman Parkinson image,” the bride says.
“There are amazing flowers draped all over the building, and it has this incredible kidney-shaped pool. Everywhere you look it’s like a beautifully curated vignette.” It made an ideal backdrop for Constance’s vintage-heavy bridal wardrobe, itself the result of a breathless Portobello spree with her stylist friend Fiona Rubie just a month before the wedding.
“I was being too chilled about it, and then four weeks out I got this sudden surge of adrenaline and was like, ‘Oh my God, everyone’s coming, and I’ve got nothing to wear!’” This time, a traditional gown wasn’t on the cards. “I know everyone says this, but I never fantasised about the big white dress,” says Constance, who did briefly flirt with a “huge” corseted white number at Lovers Lane Vintage, but ultimately decided against it. “It looked kind of amazing, but I’d have been totally immobile.
A marshmallow in Tangier.” In the end, Constance fell hard for a liquid silk Paco Rabanne gown from 2005, in a “Y2K Tamagotchi” shade of blue with a black diamanté trim. “I tried it on and immediately felt like myself,” says the bride, who added silver Celine shoes, a custom matching cape made by London designer Claire O’Connor, and a Juliet cap that amped up the romance without detracting from the beauty look.
(“I’m co-creative director of Charlotte Tilbury, so obviously, smoky eye till I die.”) The vintage Rabanne was the first of three looks for the big day, which Constance planned with creative input from Jasper Conran himself (the pair got along famously, so much so that the designer ultimately attended the wedding as a guest). “I found this incredible Dsquared2 dress at Lovers Lane, so I wafted around in that for a while after the ceremony,” says the bride, who styled it, rather fittingly, with a pair of Yves Saint Laurent Bianca Tribute heels.
“And then for the party later I changed into a gold metallic number from Turner Vintage. It actually split late in the night and my bum was out on the dancefloor but..
. what are you gonna do? It’s the Tangier vibes.” Looking back on it all now, Constance says that magical sunset on the rooftop will be a core memory – “all of our beautiful friends were in front of us, everyone had a martini, and my friend Lydia read from The Waves by Virginia Woolf” – along with some entirely unexpected details dreamed up by the “generous, brilliant and fabulous” Jasper.
“He surprised us with a 1970s-themed marquee called ‘Club Constance’, which he had curated with lanterns and reupholstered sofas from the market. He even colour matched the wedding cake to my blue dress!” At the pool party, she says, “everyone was..
. as everyone is the day after a wedding.” But the celebrations swiftly ramped up again when the Villa Mabrouka staff filed down to the terrace clad in their crisp white jackets, each holding a different jelly on a silver tray and dancing to Madonna’s “Get Into the Groove”.
“The whole thing was so camp and amazing. We were just blown away.”.
