Meanwhile, the bride’s aunt Kathryn Fortunato and her twin sister Lizzie Fortunato’s brand LF Jewels custom-made all her jewelry for the weekend. “We took inspiration from the natural pearls on the belt and made a pair of earrings with a light green, east/west bezel set amethyst and a natural pearl hanging below,” Juno explains. “Those earrings are going to be a part of their spring 2025 assortment launching in January. They’re named the Juno Earrings, which is so fun!” Juno paired her dress with a simple pair of Mary Janes from Ayede.
The wedding weekend kicked off with a welcome party at The Acoaxet Club. Juno had found her welcome party outfit, the Khaite Bruna dress, a year before the wedding, which she paired with Manolos she found in a Sororite vintage drop and her grandmother’s vintage Ralph Lauren cashmere sweater over her shoulders. For jewelry, she wanted to foreshadow the pearl strand on the wedding dress so her aunts designed a custom double-wrapped natural pearl necklace with a gold clasp and pulled in the light green amethyst with a pair of their fine jewelry charm earrings.
On the morning of the wedding, things got interesting. “Anyone planning an outdoor wedding, specifically one on the East Coast, will hear around 5,000 times throughout their planning process that rain on your wedding day is good luck,” Juno says. “Most people will probably roll their eyes—as I did—and play it off as a way to make the bride feel better about the possibility of her picture-perfect dreams being crushed, but there is something there. Something really really important.”
When it came to planning, Juno controlled every aspect that she could. “I chose dresses for my bridesmaids that would flow in the breeze, I imagined flowers trickling down from the arbor and my perfect soon-to-be husband standing at the top of the hill as I dramatically walked from my childhood home up the field from the water,” she says. “I imagined the gasp of our guests as I walked by myself to meet my parents at the base of the aisle. It was drama, it was breathtaking, it was perfect. There was only one thing that I could not control though…the gosh darn weather.”
While the forecast looked gloomy, the bride continued to hold out hope—even as she returned home from the welcome party and discovered that there were set to be gale force winds and rain. ‘I woke up the next morning with puffy eyes, resigned to the fact that things were not in fact going to go my way,” she says. Then, she recalled a book in their family home featuring photos of a hurricane that once wiped out the harbor. “I realized that morning in the midst of my wallowing that that massive hurricane happened on September 21, 1938—86 years before our wedding day,” Juno says. “That hurricane was named Bob, which was also my grandfather’s name—the grandfather whose family is responsible for giving us our home in this place. That was my first inkling that something wild was happening. Then, I was reading a letter from my late grandmother that she wrote me many years ago that finishes with her saying, ‘I hope you always feel me holding your hand.’ As I sat in the makeup chair fighting back tears my mother came upstairs and said to me: ‘If you saw what was going down in the tent right now you would know that all of this has a purpose.’”
