Before there was JordanLuca, the fashion line, there was Jordan Gene Bowen and Luca Marchetto, the couple whose first hookup 15 years ago inspired peals of laughter at their Jan. 18 wedding celebration.
Both were 25 in December 2010, when they locked eyes at the now-closed gay bar the Joiners Arms in London’s East End. Mr. Marchetto, who had recently moved to London from his native Italy, was on a date with a man Mr. Bowen had gone out with weeks earlier. Mr. Bowen, whose date with the man had been a nonstarter, couldn’t get over Mr. Marchetto’s outfit.
“He was wrapped in a cashmere blanket with a backward baseball hat and sneakers,” Mr. Bowen said. “I thought, ‘Wow.’” Instead of ignoring their mutual attraction — Mr. Marchetto was taken with Mr. Bowen’s style, too, especially his vintage Westwood McClaren pants — they secretly exchanged phone numbers in the bathroom.
Minutes later, Mr. Marchetto told his date he wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home. He then climbed into a cab and hurried to the Liverpool Street bus station, where he and Mr. Bowen had agreed to rendezvous. “We met around 3 in the morning and kissed for ages,” Mr. Bowen said. Mr. Marchetto remembers getting home at 7 a.m. in a fog of lust, beaming over his incredible good luck.
“Jordan had told me during the kissing that he was a milliner,” Mr. Marchetto said. When his roommates started stirring that morning, he told them the good news — that he had met a “a very hot millionaire” from Notting Hill. “My English was really bad at the time,” he said. “I didn’t know what a milliner was.” (He soon learned his new crush made hats.)
Mr. Marchetto and Mr. Bowen, now both 40, started their fashion line, known for boundary-pushing men’s wear like a 2023 T-shirt mapping London’s cruising spots, in 2018 from their kitchen table. Both had developed an interest in clothing and accessories years earlier, but from different points of view.
Mr. Marchetto grew up in Bolzano, Italy, with his parents, Daniela and Claudio Marchetto, and a younger brother. “I’m a proper mountain boy from a beautiful Italian mountain village,” he said. He described his parents as hippies. “I have a lot of pictures with my mom wearing daisies.”
Peace and love factored less outwardly in Mr. Bowen’s upbringing. Born in Farnborough, England, he moved at age 5 to South London with his mother, Lisa Bowen. His father, who died in 2023, was largely absent, he said. He has no siblings. “The scenes you associate with the London subculture in the ’80s and ’90s — mohawks and string vests, hips out — my parents were in that kind of crowd,” he said. “They were punks. And that’s kind of where I come from, and it’s inherent to what I do now.”
At 18, Mr. Marchetto enrolled at an Italian veterinary school. A year later, after visiting Milan with a friend who brought him to the designer Vivienne Westwood’s shop, he rethought what he wanted to do with his life.
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
“As soon as I walked in, everything changed,” he said. “From that moment on, I knew I wanted to leave medicine and study fashion.” In 2006, he graduated from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan with a bachelor’s degree in fashion design.
Mr. Bowen’s fashion education was largely hands-on. His aunt, Kim Bowen, a stylist who was part of London’s 1970s New Romantic subculture, known for its flamboyant fashion, lived and worked in Los Angeles in the 1990s. She exposed him to a glamorous lifestyle before he had entered high school.
“She was dressing George Michael, Pink, En Vogue,” Mr. Bowen said. “I remember distinctly being on set with Janet Jackson, who was lovely to me when I was a child.” At 15, he secured an apprenticeship with the milliner Stephen Jones, a friend of Ms. Bowen’s from what he called “a kind of university of New Romantics.” The apprenticeship, in London, was meant to last a week. Instead he spent eight years making hats for Mr. Jones.
Mr. Marchetto’s visit to the Vivienne Westwood shop provided more than just inspiration. After he finished college, he designed accessories for Jil Sander for a year in Milan before moving to London to become Ms. Westwood’s personal design assistant. In 2009, at the start of what would become a five-year run at Ms. Westwood’s company, he earned a certificate in men’s wear fashion design from the University of the Arts London.
Despite the promise of their first night together at the bus station, Mr. Bowen and Mr. Marchetto’s romantic relationship hit a speed bump early on. The revelation that Mr. Bowen lived in a council flat in Notting Hill and was a milliner, not a millionaire, didn’t matter to Mr. Marchetto. But “we were very awkward and very young, and I couldn’t figure out how to move the relationship forward,” said Mr. Bowen, who was also navigating a newfound sobriety: He had been in a 12-step program for just a year to recover from drug and alcohol addictions.
In June 2011, Mr. Bowen broke up with Mr. Marchetto. But he kept making excuses to see him in East London. “I’d leave something at his place, then say I needed to come back and get it,” he said. By 2012, he knew he had made a mistake. On Jan. 18, 2012, he sent Mr. Marchetto, who was traveling underground on the tube and had no cell service, a text.
“What I said was really cheesy,” Mr. Bowen said. “It was, ‘You still make my heart race.’” Mr. Marchetto didn’t respond to the text for “ages,” he said. “It was excruciating.”
What Mr. Bowen considered ages, though, was just an hour. And the reply that eventually landed made his heart sing. “Luca said, ‘Same around here,’” Mr. Bowen said. “We’ve basically been together since then.”
In 2014, Mr. Marchetto moved into Mr. Bowen’s Notting Hill flat. A year later, they started working together as consultants for friends who were starting clothing brands. By 2018, they were designing their own T-shirts and coming up with ideas for patterns and prints they envisioned models wearing on fashion runways.
JordanLuca was established in 2019. Mr. Bowen remembers a conversation about naming the company. “It was, ‘How stupid would it be to call a business JordanLuca,’ because it was so obvious, so easy,” he said. But the name stuck, even though few in the industry would get to know it during the pandemic.
“Things were so strange at that time, with Brexit, with Covid,” Mr. Bowen said. “We couldn’t really get things going. But it did give us an opportunity to do something kind of radical, brave and big.” By January 2022, when their twice-yearly fashion shows premiered at Milan Fashion Week, they were winning praise for their transgressive designs and tailoring from magazines including GQ and Vogue Italia.
But toward the end of that year, radical, brave and big started feeling less sustainable.
By the middle of 2024, when they were brainstorming what to present at their next show in Milan, the couple decided JordanLuca’s focus needed a change.
After a summer vacation in Italy, they returned to Notting Hill thinking about a world in crisis. “There’s crisis in the wars we’re living through, in the political policies,” Mr. Bowen said. The brand, they felt, should express its commitment to survival and to authenticity.
On Sept. 5, Mr. Marchetto and Mr. Bowen had settled in for a quiet evening at home when Mr. Bowen emerged from the kitchen and proposed.
“I was watching Netflix and Jordan had been chopping an onion, making dinner,” Mr. Marchetto said. “He suddenly came in front of me and said, ‘Why don’t we get married at the show?’”
“We had been in this kind of limbo of, how can we convey this new message of authenticity?” Mr. Bowen said. A wedding at a fashion show seemed “completely mad,” Mr. Marchetto said. “But I looked at him and said, ‘It’s genius.’ Nothing is more authentic than our love. Why not make this declaration.”
Because marrying in Italy presented legal hurdles, the couple was legally wed Jan. 2 by Sergio Simion, a registrar at Chelsea Old Town Hall in London with four witnesses, including Lisa Bowen, by their sides. Then, on Jan. 18, at the end of the JordanLuca fall/winter 2025 fashion show at Via Tortona 27 in Milan, they hosted a wedding ceremony. Instead of taking a bow as their models sashayed off the runway, they faced each other onstage, at a makeshift altar.
Just a handful of the 450 attendees in the room had arrived knowing they would be wedding guests when the show’s house music faded into an edgy version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”
Mr. Marchetto was escorted down the runway by his parents, clad in a black cashmere jacket woven with silver threads, a fabric the pair had created. Mr. Bowen, who wore a white jacket with red lapels made of silk and leather, walked with his mother.
Arabella Wilde, a friend and the celebrant who met them onstage, explained the surprise. “We all know Jordan and Luca like to challenge the normal,” she said, adding that combining a wedding with their show is “spectacularly them” and that “love, like fashion, is all about finding that perfect fit.”
In handwritten vows, followed by an exchange of rings, Mr. Marchetto told Mr. Bowen that their love transcends the kind that runs the risk of short-circuiting. “After 15 years together, we have empathy for each other,” he said. “Our love accommodates mistakes.” Mr. Bowen told Mr. Marchetto that their love strives “to nourish, not devour.”
Mr. Marchetto, who teared up during his vows, had been reading the room during the ceremony. “For me, it was very real, very big, so of course I cried,” he said. He didn’t expect the audience to share his depth of feeling.
“Fashion editors are usually very tough people,” he said. “But they were crying, too.”
On This Day
When Jan. 18, 2025
Where Via Tortona 27, Milan
A Real Treat After the couple recessed down the runway, assistants wheeled in a seven-tier wedding cake. On top were custom-designed miniatures of the grooms. “We made them in the way we look every day,” Mr. Marchetto said. His figurine was outfitted in shorts and a backward baseball cap, with a hoodie tied around its waist; Mr. Bowen’s wore a white collared shirt and sneakers.
Support and Solidarity Mr. Bowen still attends 12-step groups. And Mr. Marchetto has been sober “by proxy” for more than a decade, Mr. Bowen said. “We create everything completely sober.”
The Altar The grooms designed the altar, featuring a mix of velvet and sequins, in front of which runway models and parents posed. “We based it on old references from movies,” Mr. Bowen said. After the wedding, attended by what Mr. Bowen called “lots of very serious fashionista types,” the couple received well wishes from other designers and industry people. “We were humbled and taken aback by the response,” he said.
The post A ‘Perfect Fit’ in Love and Fashion appeared first on New York Times.
