Case 01 · Oxford Exchange, Tampa, FL · 2025
Three Dresses, One Wedding Day
Taylor came to us for a wedding gown and left with three. Over six months we built two dresses from scratch and reworked a third from her grandmother's wedding dress: a ceremony gown, an evening look, and a bridal shower set, each made to her measurements. It is still the project we are proudest of, and the one that taught us how much a single wedding day can hold.
From the bride
“Safonova Couture made me not one, not two but three stunning looks.”
Taylor
Look one · the ceremony
A Gown with a Heart Sewn Inside
Taylor arrived with a photograph of Zendaya at the 2025 Golden Globes and a question: could that shape become a wedding dress? We rebuilt the bodice into something of her own, made the gown in heavyweight silk, and turned the train into a detachable overskirt so she could move from ceremony to dancing without changing.
Inside the lining we stitched a small heart cut from her grandmother’s wedding dress. The silk had almost no give, so the fit took months of patient work; we wanted the shape to come from the seams, not from visible darts.
One dress, two states: with the overskirt and train for the ceremony, and as a narrow column for the rest of the night. The last frame is the bride being dressed, twenty minutes before.
Working drawings
Every dress starts on paper like this: the bodice seams, where the boning sits, how the overskirt attaches and how it comes away in one movement. The notes in the margins are what the bride approves before a single metre of silk is cut.
Look two · the evening
Fifteen Metres of Feathers, Dyed to Order
For the evening Taylor wanted something else entirely. She sent a photograph of Elsa Hosk at Cannes and wrote that she loved the feathers, but wanted the whole thing in blue.
We had roughly fifteen metres of natural ostrich feathers dyed to a soft blue made specifically for her, over a corset base and hours of hand-draping. The dress was built in two stages: first in Russia alongside a colleague, then finished in our Florida studio.
The staircase at Oxford Exchange, with the feathered train laid down the steps.
Look three · the bridal shower
Her Grandmother's Dress, Worn Again
Taylor’s grandmother sewed this wedding dress for her own daughter. We took it apart and rebuilt it into a two-piece set: a top and a skirt for the bridal shower, keeping the original lace and the hand of the woman who made it. Neither Taylor’s mother nor the rest of the family knew until she walked in wearing it.
Photographs to come
The before-and-after of this piece lives on the family’s cameras rather than ours. We would rather leave the space empty than fill it with something else.
The end of the night
Both women in dresses from the same hands: the bride’s silk column, and the black velvet Aleksandra made for herself.