An Exclusive Look Inside Katharine McPhee and David Foster’s Wedding in London
An Exclusive Look Inside Katharine McPhee and David Foster’s Wedding in London
Singer, Broadway star, and American Idol alum Katharine McPhee married music producer David Foster in London last weekend. The two were first linked in the spring of 2017, and a little more than a year later, Foster proposed in Italy, with an emerald-cut engagement ring.
McPhee became taken with London while starring in Waitress on the West End, so having she and Foster’s destination wedding there felt like a perfect fit. “It was an idea that our closest friends came up with for us,” she says. “We were all going to be in London together to travel throughout Europe—a tradition David does every year, and it coincided perfectly with the end of my run in Waitress the musical.”
To kick off the wedding weekend, which was all organized by Charlotte Kent at Banana Split, friends and family were given a tour of the city, and then on Friday, the ceremony took place at the Church of St. Yeghiche in the South Kensington district of West London. The bride made a breathtaking entrance in her custom Zac Posen wedding dress that featured a strapless sweetheart neckline and multiple layers of antique white striped tulle. The dress required 250 yards of tulle: 150 yards of pin-tucked tulle and an additional 100 yards of tulle under the pin-tucked structure.
“I really trusted Zac Posen to make my wedding dress,” she says. “I knew he would bring my dream to fruition. I had sent him some reference images of Princess Grace. I loved her classic beauty and elegant simplicity. Zac told me he wanted to incorporate our love of music somehow into the dress, so one of David’s songs was notated on the back. It was the song, ‘The Colour of my Love,’ that he wrote for Celine Dion and René Angélil for their wedding day. It was a relationship that David always admired, and [he] was there from the beginning. The wedding dress turned out to be more than I could’ve ever imagined, but what I didn’t expect was that Zac would also be with me as a guest and to personally oversee my every move.”
McPhee and Foster, who wore a tux by Stefano Ricci for the big day, said “I do” in front of 150 guests, including the groom’s five daughters: Allison, Amy, Sara, Erin, and Jordan. (Foster has four ex-wives, B.J. Cook, Rebecca Dyer, Linda Thompson, and Yolanda Hadid; McPhee was previously married to Nick Cokas.) The bride’s beautiful styling was actually the work of her new step-daughter Jordan Foster, the youngest of Foster’s five children. “It was also very special to have David’s incredibly talented daughter Jordan—who is already an established a stylist—be with me for all my fittings and giving her input. I really don’t think that my veil [which was made of a pin-tucked tulle capeline] would have turned out the way it did without her input. It was such a cool concept. It was dramatic and original.”
Hours before their wedding, the Smash actress took to Instagram to send her now-husband some pre-ceremony love: “Exactly 13 years ago today my very first single, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ was released right after Idol…. I’m marrying the man who produced it. Life is full of beautiful coincidences, isn’t it? Thank you for taking me over the rainbow, David.”
Later that evening, McPhee changed into an off-the-shoulder off-white Zac Posen dress from the designer’s Pre-Fall 2018 collection before dinner at a private club in London. “The food was family style,” McPhee explains. “We wanted it to be as non-fussy as possible...and feel like we were inside someone’s home—and it felt just like that.” She later channeled Cinderella in a form-fitting smokey blue duchess satin tea-length Zac Posen cocktail dress based off of a look from the Spring 2013 collection, for cutting the cake and hitting the dance floor with Foster to the very song notated in her dress. She paired this third look of the night with embellished silver sandals and a spherical metallic crystal clutch by Judith Leiber. “[Late night, we had a backup after-party plan, but everyone was too tired!” McPhee reveals. And after the wedding weekend came to a close, the newlyweds jetted off to Capri, the very place where they got engaged on July 2, 2018, one year later, on a honeymoon that sounds a lot like happily ever after.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
