Dolce and Siqueira were instrumental in the decision to have the wedding in Venice. Bezos and Sánchez were focused on Italy, but weren’t sure where. (They’d also considered Hawaii, where they own a home.) Capri had been discussed, and Taormina, but the Italian couple insisted Venice was the most romantic city in the world. Then Diane von Fürstenberg, who lives in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, offered to host a welcome dinner to kick off the weekend. The decision was made. “I called Venice ‘it’ and Diane corrected me and said, ‘Venice is a she!’” explains Sánchez, imitating von Fürstenberg’s authoritative purr, “and so now I always refer to Venice as she.”
“It’s important the clothes live with the location,” explains Dolce. “You stay in harmonia like a movie.” This means that one of the dresses for the weekend, a draped, deep-V, burgundy velvet look, was inspired by the Doges of Venice—though only in color, says Gabbana. (Historically, Doges, the medieval magistrates who ruled the Venetian oligarchy, wore loose, high-necked crimson robes.) Another option features a print of the Canaletto painting The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day on double-faced duchess silk, embellished with shimmering Swarovski crystals and seed and bugle beads.
At the Vogue shoot, Sánchez wears the Canaletto dress against a wall of not-yet-flowering jasmine studded by a prop stylist with pale pink English roses. Cobblestones present a challenge underfoot. “I’m an expert in heels,” Sánchez says. “I think I was born in stilettos!”
When Sánchez was a little girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she used to make veils with extra lace from her mother’s sewing supplies. “I always wanted to be a bride,” she recalls. Her aunt would send her copies of Vogue Spain and she would find dresses she liked and buy the fabric to make them with her mom, like a red puff-sleeve one for high school prom.
“I mean, that’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to something like this,” she says. Her first wedding dress was something she bought when she saw it in a shop window while driving through Century City. “I’ve never had a dress designed for me like this—something so personal.” During the fitting in Milan the day before the shoot, Dolce took a pair of fabric shears and snipped the sleeve off of the bodice. “I couldn’t believe it!” marvels Sánchez. “He literally just cut it off!” He then reapplied it, slightly adjusted.
The dress, which took 900 hours of atelier work, also features “little, little, little buttons,” per Gabbana, from neck to torso. Known as priest buttons, the motif is continued down the train—180 hand-finished, silk chiffon-covered buttons in all. “The whole thing was like a dream,” Sánchez says.