Few weddings remain fashion reference points a decade after the event. Yet no one familiar with fashion editor Giovanna Battaglia’s wedding has forgotten the spectacle of couture on display. When she married Swedish property developer Oscar Engelbert in June 2016, she approached the occasion as one would expect, with the conviction of someone who had spent her career understanding the intricacies of fashion designers and their craft, commissioning six fashion houses to create seven entirely distinct couture dresses for celebrations spanning Stockholm and three spectacular days on Capri. Valentino, Thom Browne, Azzedine Alaïa, Alexander McQueen, Giambattista Valli and Prada each delivered something true to her exacting brief, each vastly different from the other. At the time the Instagram hashtag #gioandoscar offered an impossibly photogenic collision of couture, Capri and fashion-world excess, but that was as far as the story went. Now Battaglia Engelbert, Swarovski’s Global Creative Director, has revisited each of the couture gowns in a new YouTube series, opening the archive on the sketches, fittings, conversations and creative manoeuvring that produced them. Ten years on, the couture remains iconic. And learning the stories behind each look is even better.
Dress No.1 Valentino
With Giovanna Battaglia’s husband-to-be, Oscar Engelbert, being from Sweden, the couple held a private civil ceremony in Stockholm before the official festivities on Capri. The day still demanded its own dedicated dresses. For the vows themselves, Battaglia wanted a caped, off-the-shoulder Valentino couture gown she described as pure and minimal, yet regal and bold, in what turns out to be a study in restraint from a bride who would spend the following week demonstrating the opposite. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, then Valentino’s creative design duo, created a dress perfectly suited to the occasion.
Dress No.2 Thom Browne
After Stockholm’s civil event, the evening’s look shifted entirely. Where Valentino delivered classical purity, Thom Browne, the American master of subversive tailoring, produced something closer to sculpture. The intricately embroidered, pearl-trimmed dress and capelet, its silhouette described by Battaglia as sculptural and futuristic, was completed by a Stephen Jones headband. As a designer Browne rarely ventures into bridal territory, and his rigorous, almost architectural approach to construction gave the dress an edge that most wedding looks never attempt. The pearl trim nodded to bridal convention while the capelet added a sense of drama that photographed beautifully. A decade later, the dress remains timeless and suited to any occasion.
Dress No.3 Alaïa
Capri’s celebrations started with a sentimental commission. For the welcome dinner in the piazzetta, Battaglia decided the weekend should begin with an A, as in Azzedine Alaïa, who had never made her a custom piece before. Alaïa, renowned as the most exacting of couturiers, a man who kept clients waiting years to secure his talents, broke his own rules and the two collaborated. The outcome was a dress with sleeves shaped after classic Italian straw parasols, with white straw woven through his signature knit. A reinterpretation of a beach umbrella by way of the designer’s Paris salon on rue de Moussy. White coral De Simone Fratelli earrings and an orchid in the hair were the only addition the look required. When Alaïa passed away the following year, the photographs from the fitting in his Paris studio became treasured fashion artefacts.
Dress No.4 Alexander McQueen
For the main ceremony, Battaglia was very clear: the moment demanded royal majesty. With the vows staged at Capri’s Punta Carena lighthouse, the brief to designer Sarah Burton was that she wanted to feel like a queen. Burton answered with a corset conceived as a vase from which organza ruffles spread outward, committing almost 500 metres of organza to a train that ran four metres long. The designer had already dressed the Princess of Wales and understood ceremonial scale better than anyone, yet the extravagance still exceeded expectations, resulting in a dress that Battaglia describes as alive, mimicking the sea and cliffs of Capri, its ruffles breaking in the photographs precisely as the water did below. A long veil and white blooms set into a sleek high bun, an embroidered parasol, and heart-shaped confetti falling over the first kiss completed an image that a decade of weddings has pursued but never exceeded.
Dress No.5 Alexander McQueen
The fact that the wedding press, despite photographing every other conceivable detail of the weekend, managed to miss for 10 years that there were two McQueen dresses is the YouTube series’ most satisfying disclosure. The four-metre train on a clifftop became the iconic moment the world devoured. But once the confetti had settled the bride changed into a second Burton commission for the chandelier-lit wedding dinner above the Capri coastline. Burton had rehearsed this exact choreography for the Princess of Wales in 2011, whose second gown appeared only at the private Buckingham Palace dinner that evening. Battaglia has finally shared her own second act, which is equally deserving of visual praise.
Dress No.6 Giambattista Valli
With the formalities complete, another dress changed the tempo. For the party, Giambattista Valli created a macramé minidress inspired by Neapolitan Capodimonte vases, worn with matching Manolo Blahnik boots and a three-metre organza-chiffon cape. The porcelain reference was more than a decorative flourish; it tied the look to the Bay of Naples below, grounding an exuberant dress in genuine regional literacy. The lacy thigh-high Blahnik boots signalled that the bride fully intended to dance at her own wedding, and the couture macramé was built to allow it, holding its structure through fireworks and everything that followed. The silhouette proved influential. The white minidress and boots have since become the default grammar of the bridal after-party, repeated endlessly across a decade of receptions. Yet Battaglia’s original look still stands apart, because she remains the original inspiration.
Dress No.7 Prada
The night after the wedding, the couple hosted an extravagant fête on an oil barge, themed the Celebration of Exaggeration. The bride’s bespoke Prada dress, dubbed the Crystal Monument, answered the theme precisely. Built from over-embroidered layers of crystal net and paillettes held together with metal rings, the construction and embellishment stole the night. The fact that Prada supplied a dedicated repair kit for the evening says everything about the engineering involved. Delfina Delettrez completed it with an earpiece of peridot, amethyst, topaz and quartz named the Tree of Life, which appeared to have grown from the bride’s head. Miuccia Prada’s intellectual maximalism, deployed at full scale on open water, closed the wedding as deliberately as Valentino had opened it.
