Inside Lena Dunham’s Whimsical, Whirlwind London Wedding - Vogue

"Lu, how did we get engaged?" Lena Dunham calls to her husband of three days across the room in Somerset, England, where they are taking a brief honeymoon after getting married in London last Saturday night. "Lu," aka Peruvian-British musician Luis Felber, who performs as Attawalpa, pauses his dinner prep—a veggie pasta with ginger, garlic, onion, and minced pumpkin, served with a salad of tiny green plums and fennel tossed in agave dressing—to weigh in. "Well, you were not feeling well, and I asked to visit you in the hospital, and I stayed longer than I was supposed to stay. And I just thought, that left me with a funny feeling seeing you not feeling well. And then the next day when you got back, we were in bed, and I said, 'I just I don't ever want you to go through that on your own again.' And you said, 'Oh, I want to marry you someday.' And I said, 'Why don't we make that someday, soon day? The next day, I went for a walk with my friend Tom, and he was going on about his life, and I was like, 'I think I proposed to Lena last night.' And when I got home, we made it real."

"He does the engagement story better than I do," Dunham says, her joy palpable through a transatlantic phone call. After meeting in January through what the 35-year-old actor, writer, and filmmaker refers to as "a series of friends machinations," Dunham and Felber turned a whirlwind romance into a whirlwind engagement and impromptu wedding at Soho's Union Club, where Dunham wore three custom dresses designed by Christopher Kane. "I was trying to parse it, and we were sort of talking about it, but talking around it," Dunham says of Felber's proposal, noting that some people do exactly that for 10 years. "So we just cut the 10 years down to 10 hours. And then we took a month to get married instead of waiting six months or a year."

Dunham and Felber, both of whom are in the middle of their own respective creative projects (Dunham is editing a film that Felber is writing the music for), accepted that planning and executing a wedding in just one month, during a pandemic, would not be without its challenges. So they called in reinforcements. "There was no way this was going to be pulled off without help, and it was my mother who suggested reaching out to her gallerist Amanda Wilkinson's child, Donna," says Dunham. Event coordinators Donna Marcus Duke and their partner, Jacob Mallinson Bird, had never done a wedding before, but they were up for the challenge, which was significant—not least because of COVID travel restrictions. "Poor Jacob and Donna were dealing with such undulating invite stuff, because people kept falling out," says Dunham, adding that a few people on her already truncated guest list could not attend because they caught the virus. "Hearing from a wedding guest that they can't make it because they have COVID is a great reminder that this is still going on, and to take all of the precautions seriously." And Dunham and Felber made that a priority: All guests were required to take two lateral flow tests as well as present proof of vaccination. "I'm immune compromised, so I take COVID restrictions really seriously," explains Dunham, "but it's important to both of us. Lu wants to keep me safe, and he wants live music to come back, and he is also just thoughtful about human safety in general!" Masks were also made available at the venue, which was set up to allow for sufficient spacing between guests and between the ceremony, reception, and dancing.

All in, Dunham estimates that about 60 people gathered at the members-only club to witness the couple exchange vows, which they wrote themselves, underneath a makeshift chuppah designed by florist Gail Smith. "One of the first influences that we showed Donna were these dyed baby blue bodega roses, and they were like, 'But what if you didn't have to dye your flowers?'" says Dunham. ("Immediately, we knew this would be a wedding without a single white rose," jokes Duke.) "They introduced us to Gail, who uses all local English flowers, but because she knew we were obsessed with bright tie-dyed, almost overdyed, flowers, she managed to be in both worlds and completely blew us away." The chuppah, a traditional Jewish wedding altar, was one of a handful of spiritual gestures Dunham, whose mother is Jewish, and Felber, whose father is Jewish, wanted to include. Through Duke, who studied theology at Oxford, they met their officiant, Dr. Harrie Cedar, who helped them retain traditional elements with modern touches. "I loved her from the moment I saw her," Felber says of Cedar, a queer woman who coordinated such traditional elements as the bride and groom circling each other three times, drinking from the same wine cup, and breaking a glass to mark the end of the ceremony. "Lu did some really amazing Spanish-accented Hebrew that had the whole place in stitches," Dunham says of the ceremony, which was viewed in person and on Zoom, broadcast to many of her friends and family in New York and Los Angeles, and to Felber's family in Peru.

But Dunham and Felber, who wore a custom blue suede suit designed by Emily Bode, were clearly elated by the in-person commitment. "In terms of the bridal party, if we include siblings, we were nine. You can have a far bigger wedding with less bridesmaids, but I guess it just speaks to how excited I was to have my close friends there," Dunham explains of her bridesmaids, who included Taylor Swift; actor Myha'la Herrold; Rosa Mercuriadis; Tommy Dorfman; Ali Trustman; her cousin Jenna Hally Rubenstein; Felber's sister Alma-Kori Felber; and Dunham's podcasting partner, Alissa Bennett, who flew in for the weekend and brought Dunham her "something borrowed" in the form of a Lego soldier belonging to her son Ollie. "I spent so much time during the pandemic talking to my girlfriends about our feelings over FaceTime, but a few of my best friends I haven't seen in over a year," says Dunham. "And, you know, my girlfriends have had to deal with a lot of not-so-happy things with me in our adulthood, so to be able to celebrate something joyful and use it as an excuse to be together was very special."

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