The TikTok star Becca Bloom officially secured her place in the summer wedding hall of fame with a lavish multiday celebration on Lake Como in Italy, chronicled in a robust Vogue feature.
Her nuptials joined this season’s most talked-about spectacles, from the opulent Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, to the star-studded Hamptons wedding of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, to the grand English countryside wedding of Eve Jobs and Harry Charles.
But unlike the A-listers, social media influencers brought their followers along for the wedding preparations — and in some cases the ceremony. Some are calling it a new kind of “royal wedding.”
Becca Bloom, a 27-year-old influencer whose real name is Rebecca Ma, according to a profile in The Wall Street Journal, began posting on TikTok in January and now has more than four million followers on the platform and nearly two million on Instagram.
Ms. Ma, known as the “Queen of RichTok,” has built an audience around luxury content. Her fans, as one creator said, seem to admire her as an example of “rich people who rich right.”
According to The Journal, her parents founded Camelot Information Systems, an I.T. services company with a headquarters in China. Ms. Ma started several business ventures as a teenager. She attended high school in Atherton, Calif., and went on to graduate from the University of Southern California. She now works in financial technology.
In her videos, she unboxes clothes, bags and jewelry from designer brands like Hermès, Dior, Chanel and Bulgari. She brings viewers on shopping trips at Van Cleef & Arpels, or to get ready with her for galas and events. She plates a chef-prepared, caviar-topped breakfast for her cat. She reveals the contents of her Birkin and even doles out dating advice. Her followers seem hungry for it all — but especially for her wedding content.
Ms. Ma has posted about her wedding venue, décor ideas, invitations, designer dress contenders, a shoe shopping trip in Paris, and some of the luxury gifts under her “wedding tree.” She shared the story of her engagement to David Pownall, a tech worker, who surprised her with a proposal in Positano, Italy, in 2023. She’s not a typical influencer because social media doesn’t seem to be the source of her income, and her wedding, too, was far from the typical influencer wedding.
For months, she built anticipation for the event. Followers commented asking whether she would livestream the celebration. Some asked for invitations. In the days after the rumored wedding date, fans eagerly awaited any morsel of content from the event. Ms. Ma held out for the big reveal: a Vogue article and an accompanying TikTok post, where fans rejoiced in the comments and congratulated the newlyweds.
According to Vogue, Ms. Ma and Mr. Pownall celebrated their wedding at Villa Balbiano, a private villa on Lake Como, on Aug. 28. A representative for Ms. Ma declined to comment for this article.
For the ceremony, the bride wore a “custom Oscar de la Renta gown embroidered with laser-cut blooming peonies” and high jewelry pieces from the Van Cleef & Arpels Folie des Prés collection (which features pieces that sell for over $400,000), according to Vogue. The wedding photography was by Jose Villa, a well-known fine-art wedding photographer, who also recently shot Demi Lovato’s Santa Barbara wedding.
Federica Beni, a luxury wedding planner in the Marche region of Italy, said that Lake Como is “one of the most iconic” places, known as a hot spot for celebrities like John Legend, who married Chrissy Teigen there, and George Clooney, who has a house there. For three days and two nights at Villa Balbiano, Ms. Ma said on TikTok, the venue price was $100,000 to $150,000. Factoring in Ms. Ma’s sought-after floral designer, Larry Walshe, and photographer, along with some of the clothing and jewelry she wore, Ms. Beni estimated that the overall cost of the wedding weekend could be $3 million to $4 million.
She added that vendors in Lake Como “cost from 30 to 50 percent more than the same vendors offering the same high-end service” in other parts of Italy.
Content Plans and Photo Booths on ‘High Gear’
Social media has changed the wedding world in many ways.
“In the beginning, you got engaged and you went and you bought 10 bridal magazines,” said Michelle Rago, founder of Michelle Rago Destinations, a New Jersey-based company that produces luxury weddings and events around the world. “Now, you go on social media and you look at what everybody else is doing.”
Ms. Rago, who has been in the industry for more than 30 years, said that these days she rarely does a wedding without a stylist or styling team, a hair and makeup team, and photographers who have experience in fashion or documentary-style work. She often works with couples to establish plans for their wedding content, ensuring that couples have a voice in what is posted. The plan will often include a one-minute video clip that is done by the morning after the wedding, as well as a handful of approved photos that the bride will be first to post.
The desire to create a memorable and media-worthy experience affects wedding planning in different ways. Sometimes, Ms. Rago said, couples will choose a wedding destination that they’ve never been to, because they’ve seen it online. Instead of simply having a photo booth, as one might have done 10 years ago, some couples are now creating a “destination for people to take photos,” Ms. Rago said. She called it “sort of a photo booth on high gear.”
In the Vogue article, Ms. Ma shared that the Lake Como extravaganza wasn’t the end of her wedding celebrations. The couple and their families are planning to have “a spectacular, traditional Asian wedding on a much larger scale,” she said. Though it’s hard to see how they could go bigger, one thing is certain: Her followers will want to come along for the ride.
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