Nicole Warne of Gary Pepper Girl Had a Wedding at the Edge of the Earth in New Zealand

Nicole Warne of Gary Pepper Girl Had Wedding on the Edge of the Earth in New Zealand

With 1.7 million Instagram followers and an online presence that launched over nine years ago, Nicole Warne (aka Gary Pepper Girl) is an OG digital influencer. In 2009, when social media was still a bit of an enigma, she started an online vintage store called Gary Pepper Vintage. There, she sold womenswear inspired by the fun, bold styles seen on the Harajuku girls in Tokyo. Ever the branding genius, she wanted a name that felt a little weird and intriguing. “I liked that Gary sounds masculine and Pepper sounds feminine, but my main goal was to create a something memorable—and so, Gary Pepper Girl was born!”

Like any influencer worth her salt, Nicole fell madly in love with a photographer. “Luke [Shadbolt] and I met through mutual friends at a Christmas party,” she remembers. “We both grew up on the Central Coast in NSW, Australia, which is a small seaside town, so it felt odd that we hadn’t met before. But, as soon as we did, there was instant chemistry.”

After their first brief encounter, they went skydiving and joked about how amazing it would be if they ultimately got married and could tell people that their first date had involved jumping out of a plane. “It’s crazy that we actually ended up getting married!” Nicole laughs. “I think it’s a testament to our mutual love for adventure and how much we trusted each other from the very beginning.”

Eight years later, Luke proposed on a spontaneous trip to Tokyo during cherry blossom season. “He told me he had always planned on proposing in Japan as it was the first place we traveled to as a couple,” says Nicole. “But given we booked this trip only two days before flying out it was serendipitous that the ring he’d been designing for months unexpectedly arrived the day we flew out!”

When Luke asked Nicole to marry him, they were in a little boat on a lake drifting underneath some sakura trees. “There was a storm approaching so there were cherry blossom petals softly falling around us as,” Nicole remembers. “For me, it was perfect. We felt like we had the place all to ourselves, and it truly felt like a scene out of a movie.”

After the engagement, the two dove headfirst into planning. “We wanted a destination close enough for all of our family and friends—we had 90 guests traveling from Australia—and somewhere they could keep exploring after the wedding,” says Nicole. “If we eloped we’d probably have gotten married in Norway, so we felt like New Zealand was the closest place geographically that suited our desire for wild nature, mountains, lakes, fjords, and glaciers.”

They decided on a place called Rippon Hall in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand—a biodynamic vineyard that believes that the energy and love from each wedding goes into the earth and helps the grapes grow. The couple made sure their wedding complemented the location’s natural surroundings by using materials like timber furniture, grass floors, and an abundance of flowers styled to look like they were growing from the earth or spilling onto the floor.

“For me, the floral arrangements were the most important part of the overall aesthetic, so I worked with one of the Sydney’s leading florists, Myra Perez from My Violet, to bring my ideas to life,” says Nicole. “I wanted each part of our wedding to have its own floral moment, from the ceremony, to the reception, to the dance hall, to the courtyard—they all had different color schemes, but needed to feel like they were telling a cohesive story.”

Nicole really wanted to avoid anything that resembled a rustic wedding, so her florist worked with garden roses, hydrangeas, dahlias, delphiniums, Japanese windflowers, cosmos, and local foliage. “I think I said the word abundance hundreds of times when I was briefing Myra or Georgie about the wedding,” Nicole laughs. “I don’t do anything in halves, it’s either all or nothing, so the wedding definitely evolved into a more-is-more situation.”

As Wanaka’s weather is temperamental, an inside backup plan was a must. “I loved the idea of bringing the outdoors inside,” says Nicole. “Myra went above and beyond and installed large crab apple trees she found locally and styled them with hawthorn berries and sweet peas at our reception. She also installed purple lupines that are iconic to Wanaka, which made our wedding feel like a wild garden—exactly what I wanted.”

Ultimately, Nicole also enlisted Georgie Duddy from After the Rock, a Sydney-based wedding planner who came highly recommended, for help with logistics. “I styled the wedding and Luke and I designed the wedding invitations as he’s also a graphic designer, but I needed someone who knew the best vendors and could bring these ideas to life, and quickly,” she explains. “I was busy with work, and I found it hard to produce our wedding at the same time, so Georgie came on board four months out from the wedding—no easy feat for a wedding planner but she accepted the challenge with energy and passion.” At the beginning, Nicole found planning her wedding really isolating, but found the most capable, experienced, and hardworking friend in Georgie. “I don’t know if everyone has such an emotional connection to their wedding planner, but Georgie, Myra my florist, and I all became instant friends.”

The wedding was on a Monday, which Nicole recognizes is unusual, but the venue was booked every weekend during high season for 18 months straight. “Soon after we confirmed our venue, I went to get my astrology read and they told me that we had planned our wedding on the exact day of my Saturn return,” Nicole reveals. “It wasn’t intentional, but it felt symbolic of the new chapter that lay ahead, and made our day even more special.”

It must have been auspicious, because choosing a wedding wardrobe proved easy for Nicole. “I always knew I wanted to wear a mix of international and Australian designers but nothing too bridal,” says Nicole. “So I ended up with five custom looks for the three-day celebration.”

She wore a custom Valentino Haute Couture dress and veil to the ceremony. “I’ve always been a Valentino girl, but I never could have imagined I would wear Valentino Haute Couture to my wedding.” She always thought she’d go for a classic, minimal white satin crepe look, but she’d worn similar dresses to red carpet events. “I ended up referencing design elements from two Valentino Haute Couture dresses from previous collections, which Pierpaolo tweaked to make special,” says Nicole. “My main goal was to feel modern, so I loved the crop top with the long sleeves. The dress had the most exquisite silk petal embroidery which was encrusted with crystals, which took the atelier months to create by hand. Even though the dress was covered in flowers it didn’t feel too bridal, it just felt like a true reflection of me.”

For the reception, she wore a custom white velvet Oscar de la Renta dress, then a white satin dress by Dion Lee for the after-party. She also wore a custom pant look by Maticevski to the welcome drinks the night before and a custom Michael Lo Sordo dress to the Hamptons-themed recovery brunch. For jewelry, she wanted pieces that she could wear again and also hand down to her children, so she invested in Cartier diamonds studs with a matching bracelet and a necklace—she knew she’d have them forever.

For beauty, she worked with Victoria Baron on makeup and Daren Borthwick on hair. “They’re two of the best in the Australian beauty industry and people I’ve been lucky enough to know for years,” says Nicole. “I’m all about skin so I wanted to have dewy, luminous skin with soft peach tones on the eyes, cheeks, and lips. I wanted to look fresh and effortless.”

For hair, Nicole wanted her bridesmaids to feel like themselves—the key was not to be too done. Daren gave the girls a soft wave or curve depending on their natural style. Nicole didn’t want anything too traditional, so she opted for a bun with a modern twist. “We literally tied my hair in a knot and left the ends sticking out of the bottom to give it that imperfect finish,” she says. “I couldn’t find any hairpieces I loved, so my friend Ryan Storer made these beautiful pearl hair pins that we scattered through my hair to look like rain drops that would catch the light and help make my hair shimmer.”

Meanwhile, Luke wore a custom dark green velvet tuxedo with black satin lapels and patent shoes by Giorgio Armani. “I couldn’t tell him what to wear—I never can—so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he came back from his fitting saying he went with a velvet suit!” Nicole jokes. The bridesmaids were in custom Dion Lee dresses and the groomsmen wore custom Giorgio Armani suits.

“I didn’t want my bridesmaids to match as that felt too traditional for me, so I referenced my favorite look from Dion’s recent collection and asked him to create four different looks with a cohesive theme in a beautiful gold satin,” says Nicole. “We focused on a beautiful twist detail, which featured on my bridesmaid’s shoulder and waist either as a dress or pantsuit.”

On the morning of the wedding, the forecast predicted an 80 percent chance of rain. “The optimist in me said to set everything up outside and hope for the best,” Nicole admits. “Those could have been my famous last words, but by some miracle it didn’t rain, and we were welcomed instead by the most beautiful cloudy and dramatic backdrop. At one point, just as our celebrant announced: ‘You can kiss the bride,’ the wind was so strong it took the veil out of my hair!”

Nicole walked down the aisle to “I’m Kissing You” by Des’ree—a song from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet soundtrack that made her cry when she heard it at a Valentino show the year prior. Afterward, the newlyweds and the wedding party hopped in two helicopters that took them up to Roys Peak, a nearby mountain only five minutes away, for wedding photographs. “With the stormy weather, it was just four degrees [Celsius] up on the mountain,” says Nicole. “At one point, we couldn’t stop shaking, but everyone was running off adrenaline, committed to getting the shots, and still stunned by the sweeping panoramic view of Wanaka below.”

Back at the reception, a local restaurant from Queenstown called Artisan catered a meal that included braised short ribs, lamb shoulder, salmon, and blue cod served with vegan salads and gluten-free breads. There was a self-serve buffet with no arranged seating, as the goal was to create a warm, communal vibe. The couple wanted their guests to be able to sample a little bit of everything, so they had mini crème brûlées, chocolate brownies, passion fruit cheesecake, and hot cinnamon doughnut holes, as well as large chunks of honeycomb and chocolate styled all over the table. “Everyone just floated around and each of our different circles got to meet and socialize—it was such a special moment to witness,” says Nicole. “At the end of the day, that’s what’s the most important to us; bringing our loved ones together and creating memories we’ll hold onto forever.”

After dinner, the couple’s friend Jimmy from Flight Facilities took on DJ duty. “We couldn’t have asked for a better set list,” says Nicole. She admits that this is where the evening got a little blurry. “Everyone danced the night away. We served sweet potato fries on the dance floor as a late midnight snack to help everyone keep going!”