Not every man is interested in buying luxury skin care products for his sister, but Lorenzo De Plano is not every man. And the fact that the skin care line is run by his childhood crush may have contributed to his generosity.
Mr. De Plano, an entrepreneur and the chief of strategy at Turning Point Brands, a consumer products firm, was living in Los Angeles in September 2019 when he bought his sister, Ilaria De Plano, face oil and body polish from LaBruna Skincare, the company Nina Linnea La Bruna founded in 2018.
He hadn’t spent the seven years since they had both been students at the Birch Wathen Lenox School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side pining for Ms. La Bruna. But he wasn’t quite finished thinking about her, either.
“I would hear about her from afar,” he said. And when he did, nostalgia kicked in.
A cluster of his eighth-grade friends at Birch Wathen Lenox School had been the first to point her out, at a 2007 school dance, when she was in sixth grade.
“They said, ‘Hey, look at that girl,’” he said. “‘Her name’s Nina and she’s Italian like you.’ She was wearing a little headband, and she was all cute.”
Ms. La Bruna, 29, and Mr. De Plano, 31, both grew up on the Upper East Side in families with deep Italian roots. Mr. De Plano said he can trace his Tuscan lineage to the 15th century. Ms. La Bruna’s Florentine and Sicilian background influenced her childhood in New York, where her great-grandfather was a founding member of the Columbus Citizens Foundation, a nonprofit group that preserves Italian American heritage and achievement.
Mr. De Plano’s hopes for a middle school romance with Ms. La Bruna never materialized. But not for lack of effort.
“He’d try to talk to me,” Ms. La Bruna said. But out of shyness, “I’d skedaddle.” Around middle school, “Lorenzo was the heartthrob. In my perception, he was much older than me. And way cooler.”
A night of flirtation years later, in high school, also went nowhere. Both remember talking for hours at a mutual friend’s party when Mr. De Plano was a senior and Ms. La Bruna a sophomore. But by then, he was nearing graduation. “Life did its thing,” Mr. De Plano said.
For Mr. De Plano, whose parents are Roberta and Marco De Plano, that meant leaving New York for college at the University of Southern California, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in film production and entrepreneurship.
Ms. La Bruna graduated from N.Y.U. with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and entrepreneurship and a master’s in nutrition. Her parents, who still live in New York, are Dr. Anthony La Bruna, a plastic surgeon and Dr. Diane Hanan La Bruna, an orthodontist.
Like Mr. De Plano, Ms. La Bruna heard murmurings about what her long-ago love interest was up to during the late 2010s, as she started her career in New York. But in 2019, when he ordered the LaBruna products for his sister, she was no longer thinking of him as the out-of-her-league older man who gave her teenage butterflies. Instead, she thought of him as someone with whom she might want to reconnect.
“When I saw his name on the order, I messaged him and said, ‘Is it a gift?’” she said. Once she knew it was, she attached a personalized note. Then he wrote a glowing online review.
They were messaging each other regularly by the fall of that year, when he came home to New York from Los Angeles for Thanksgiving. On Nov. 29, Mr. De Plano sent Ms. La Bruna a text.
“I said, ‘I would love to hang out,’” he said. “‘Are you free for dinner?’” Ms. La Bruna was fighting nerves before they met at the NoLIta restaurant Public Kitchen, near her apartment.
“It was a lot of high stakes for me,” she said. “This was my crush all through high school.” But once they were seated, the nerves fell away.
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“We both had a sense of calm,” Ms. La Bruna said.
Mr. De Plano said “there was a lot of chemistry at that encounter.” For him, “it was a feeling of coming home.”
By the time they left the restaurant to meet up with mutual friends from high school, they had kissed. When it was time to say good night, “we were infatuated with each other,” Ms. La Bruna said.
The pandemic helped shape that phase into something more lasting. From California, where he was working as Turning Point Brands’ vice president of new ventures, Mr. De Plano started sending Ms. La Bruna long letters via text. Every day or two, she would send a return letter.
“We’d share what we were working on, and the dreams we had for ourselves,” Ms. La Bruna said. “It wasn’t just about what we did, but who we were and who we wanted to be.”
They were falling in love by the summer of 2020, when they met for a long weekend in Southport, Conn., at Mr. De Plano’s parents’ house. An after-dinner moment in the car is still vivid for both.
“When the ignition turned on, ‘Fade Into You’ by Mazzy Star started playing,” Ms. La Bruna said. “We were looking up at the stars and at each other. There was undeniable emotion.”
In early 2022, Ms. La Bruna rented an apartment in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and began living there part time. The same year, she and her business partner, Aliett Buttelman, started Fazit, a skin care and makeup patch business. Fazit’s sales soared in October 2024, she said, when Taylor Swift wore the brand’s freckle glitter patch to a Kansas City Chiefs football game.
“It was pretty surreal,” Ms. La Bruna said.
But the launch of her love life in California hadn’t been as charmed. In the summer of 2022, she and Mr. De Plano broke up.
“I think Nina was rightfully done with me,” Mr. De Plano said. “I was inherently independent, and I think overall she didn’t feel a strong enough level of commitment from me. So Nina left me to decide what I want. Do I want to go through life on my own, or with somebody I care about and cherish?”
The answer was soon obvious. By September, “I was groveling and begging,” he said. Ms. La Bruna had kept her apartment in Brentwood. In a bid to win her back, he filled it with roses.
“It became a courtship process all over again,” he said. But “I also gave her space and time.”
For Ms. La Bruna, the breakup was clarifying. “It needed to happen,” she said. “We both grew up a little, and we set our priorities.”
By the end of October, they were back together. Within months, they had recommitted fully enough to move in together. From California, they relocated back to the Upper East Side.
Mr. De Plano hadn’t mentioned his memory of the first time he saw her, as a sixth grader with a headband at the school dance, before they took a trip to Tuscany, Italy, in the summer of 2024.
“I kept it close,” he said.
But on July 19, as the two were wandering through a rose garden, he told her. Then he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him with an Art Deco-inspired diamond ring he had designed. The day felt ripped from the storybooks, both said. Their wedding started taking shape soon after.
The La Bruna and De Plano families both have ties to Catholicism’s spiritual center, the Vatican. Ms. La Bruna’s late grandfather, Dr. Vincent V. La Bruna, provided dental care to members of the Vatican embassy in New York from the 1960s to the 2000s and was bestowed the title of Knight of the Holy Sepulchre in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. Mr. De Plano’s grandfather, Luigi Marini, was honored with the same title in the 1980s when he brought needed medicine from New York to Pope John Paul II.
On Sept. 6, Ms. La Bruna and Mr. De Plano were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in a traditional Catholic ceremony led by the Rev. Luigi Portarulo, a priest selected by Pope Francis to work in New York. He officiated at the request of the groom’s mother, an acquaintance of his through Italian cultural organizations.
The ivory satin wedding gown by Weilu Fresolone that Ms. La Bruna made her entrance in was befittingly grand with its long train. She paired it with a custom veil from France, and an heirloom pearl amethyst necklace and earring set borrowed from the De Plano family. Mr. De Plano wore an off-white suit accented with amethyst studs to match Ms. La Bruna’s jewelry.
Several of the couple’s 275 guests had flown in from Italy to watch as Ms. La Bruna’s father escorted her down the aisle. After they were pronounced husband and wife, Ms. La Bruna and Mr. De Plano recessed down the aisle past both loved ones and strangers — St. Patrick’s is open to visitors seven days a week.
“I was looking into Lorenzo’s eyes the whole time, and feeling his presence 100 percent,” she said. “It wasn’t until we walked out” that she noticed hundreds of strangers looking on, and “cheering.”
“It was the most euphoric moment,” she said.
On This Day
When Sept. 6, 2025
Where St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan
New Voyage The reception venue, Cipriani 25 Broadway, was chosen for its mural ceiling, painted with Renaissance-style frescoes and depictions of ships and the sea, and because it marks the site where travelers once bought tickets to cross the Atlantic to Europe. The couple’s first dance was to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.”
Savoring Every Drop Before the wedding cake was served, the couple carried out another Italian tradition. In northern Italy, newlyweds customarily drink from a wedding cup passed down through generations. Not spilling “is a symbolic gesture that they’re in sync and ready to face life as one,” Ms. La Bruna said. Both sipped carefully, free of dribble, from a sterling silver goblet.
New York or Versailles? At an after-party, guests returned to classic New York fare via passed hot dogs from a Sabrett pushcart. And Ms. La Bruna, who had changed into a dress by Elisabetta Franchi, an Italian designer, treated guests to some Fazit flair. Staff members roamed the room with trays of glitter freckles and royal-style wigs, contributing to a decadent atmosphere. “Why not add a little Versailles to the dance floor?” she said.
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