Dominique Wore Vivienne Westwood to Marry Kojo at an Intimate Candlelit Wedding in Orange County

The wedding they built there was not a conventional wedding. It was, they will tell you, an elevated dinner party. One long table, candlelight, a string trio playing film scores, and a guest list kept deliberately small. Every choice that followed was an extension of a single value: connection as ceremony.

Seating was arranged in a circle so they could see every face. There was no bridal party, because they shared so many of the same friends that the distinction felt artificial. There was no dance floor. What there was, instead, was a ceremony shaped in the spirit of Quaker tradition: guests were invited to speak, siblings delivered readings, and the couple wrote vows not just for each other, but for their community. Those gathered were asked to commit to supporting the marriage. “We do,” the room said back. Dominique and Kojo describe that as the moment the day truly came alive. “Experiencing it was entirely different,” they said of planning it versus living it.

Both studied Cinematic Arts at USC, and the fingerprints of that education are visible throughout. The ceremony music was drawn entirely from films and television they love: I See the Light from Tangled, the Bridgerton rendition of Wildest Dreams, Across the Stars from Star Wars. When Edelweiss began to play, Dominique walked down the aisle. It was a song familiar enough to calm the nerves of two people who, by their own admission, were more nervous than they had anticipated. Later it played again, in the courtyard, without choreography, just the two of them moving together while their family and friends gathered close. “It was perfect,” they said, and the simplicity of that word is the point.

Dominique had been clear with herself about what kind of bride she wanted to be: the kind whose photographs she would still love in twenty years. Her ceremony look was an off-the-shoulder lace Vivienne Westwood gown, chosen after first trying the same silhouette in satin. “I felt like myself,” she said of the moment she put it on. “The best version.” She loves floral prints and pieces that require no adjustment, no management. The lace did both, and its construction, considered and unhurried, reflected her own approach to style. For the reception, she changed into a Vania Romoff gown: ruffled, layered, unapologetically romantic. Where the first look was spring and scholarship, the second was pure Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, the signal that the serious part of the day was over. Kojo wore a suit he and Dominique had chosen together at his fitting, which tells you something about how they operate.

The wedding had always been designed around what rom-coms had taught them: that a dress should reveal something true about the person wearing it. Pride and Prejudice and The Sound of Music were not incidental references. They informed the candlelight, the live music, the single long table. When Dominique talks about fashion, she talks about etiquette, timelessness, and clothes that carry meaning without saying a word.