I’m having lunch with Marcy Blum at Zero Bond, the private club in downtown Manhattan that’s become her de facto office, and our conversation is punctuated with her enthusiastic asides to pretty much anyone who passes by: “Hi, Scott!” “Hi, Soria!” “I love your hair!” Her enthusiasm feels entirely genuine, and in fact, Blum — one of the world’s most successful and sought-after wedding planners — attributes much of her success to the fact that, at heart, she’s a people person. “I actually really care about people and want to make them happy,” she says.
The people she’s made happy include A-list performers, pro athletes, literati, celebrity chefs, and others among the rich and recognizable, including Billy Joel, LeBron James, Colin Hanks, George Soros, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi, Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent, and a handful of Rockefellers. (She surely would have made Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez happy if they hadn’t called off their wedding, mid-plan.)
Another ingredient in her secret sauce is long experience: She literally wrote the book on weddings—two of them, in fact: Wedding Planning for Dummies and Wedding Kit for Dummies, both with Laura Kaiser. She’s been a wedding and event planner for nearly four decades and virtually invented the profession. Back in the day (“when Wilma Flintstone and I were partners and it was just the two of us,” she likes to say), a lot of people were blank-faced when she’d tell them what she did for a living. “Oh, you’re a florist,” they’d finally say, or, “Oh, you’re a caterer.”
In fact, catering is what got her into the event-planning business. Growing up in New York’s Riverdale neighborhood, she’d eat dinner alongside her mother — who was, she says, “a wonderful cook and a great host” — the two of them raptly watching Julia Child on the TV dragged in from the living room. She naturally gravitated toward food as a career, graduating from the Culinary Institute of America and working as a chef at ’80s Manhattan hotspots like Maxwell’s Plum and Le Coup de Fusil. She worked private events at the restaurants (and a few off-site, including several for New York mayor Ed Koch at Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence), and guests started asking her if she could cater corporate events outside the purview of the restaurants.
She could, and she did, and, she says, “it made me realize what wasn’t being attended to when just the food was being supplied.” She also sensed an unmet need for non-corporate event planning, for weddings in particular, and she put what she describes as “a teeny-weeny ad” in New York magazine to test the nuptial-planning waters. Apparently, the ad was big enough to catch the eye of someone at Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion-trade publication that in the 1980s became must reading for cognoscenti inside and outside the realm of fashion. WWD published a full-page article about Blum, after which, she says, “I got a couple of semi-celebrity events.” A friend introduced her to Bacon and Sedgwick and the Rockefellers, and it wasn’t long before word of mouth had additional celebrities (no semi about them) clamoring for her services.
Over her long career, Blum has seen weddings, celebrity and otherwise, undergo a sea change. In the ’80s, she says, weddings tended to be “very formulaic, much less lavish, less complicated.” They were also shorter, most of them single-day events (today, she notes, most of the weddings she does are at least three days long). “And I think they were a lot less personal, less customized to the couple,” she adds.
That started to change a couple of decades ago, and Blum was a driving force. Food and drink, she says, became much more important, and couples “wanted things that were evocative of who they were — something as simple as a signature cocktail or doing their own vows. They wanted more innovative and interesting décor — couches, lounge furniture, specialty drink carts, custom bars.”
Today, Blum does very few weddings in hotel ballrooms, and many of her events take place in far-flung locales like Croatia, Montenegro, St. Tropez, Puglia, and Palermo. “We do a lot of interesting, innovative, off-premises tenting situations,” she says. For a wedding set on a private estate in upstate New York, she flew in Argentine celebrity chef Francis Mallmann, who built dramatically staged cooking fires all over the property. The after party, she notes, was “a la Studio 54,” the energy supplied by what she calls “a crazy DJ” and the Grammy-winning dance-punk revival band LCD Soundsystem. “It was just an amazing event, and it hit all the demographics of the guests, from the food experience to the party experience.”
Perhaps the most obvious change in weddings over the past 40 or so years is what they cost. “Weddings,” Blum says, “are outrageously expensive at the moment.” That’s especially true of lavish celebrity weddings. “Most of the people we work with,” she explains, “are trying to create something different, and so we have a raw space or an estate or a field and we’re building from the ground up, and it’s sanitation, it’s garbage, it’s like building a little village.” Even her most well-heeled clients can be taken aback by event estimates. “We just met with a very wealthy client,” Blum says, “and he thought the wedding was going to cost a million, which is almost quaint for the kind of event we were talking about. And we said, ‘No — it’s four times that.’” When they showed him the costs on paper, many of them were for decidedly un-sexy items like tent rentals, air conditioning, construction of a kitchen, plumbing.
In addition to schooling her clients on the harsh realities of nuptial expenses, Blum oversees everything from the dress (shopping with brides-to-be and anyone else in the wedding party in need of fashion direction) to the mess (garbage, as noted earlier, being both inevitable and costly to remove). But her most important contribution, she says, is “an overall vision for the event — sometimes we call it art direction, a term I don’t love, but it’s probably the most accurate way to describe it.” There’s a definite vibe to a Blum-designed wedding — a mix of luxe, personality (the bride and groom’s), creativity, and fun. For a couple in the video game business, for instance, she came up with the idea of a 360-degree video projection that immersed partygoers in a gamer’s world.
It takes careful collaboration to pull off complex events, and Blum is practiced at reining in her ego. She’s learned, she says, to drop an idea of hers that isn’t panning out and not to dismiss someone else’s idea out of hand. That doesn’t mean she’ll greenlight what’s clearly a bad idea. When clients told her they wanted an ’80s band, she said, “That’s fine, for a set, but no one’s going to dance but you.” And when a bride-to-be nixed mushrooms because she didn’t like them, Blum gently reminded her that most of her guests probably did. (Long experience has taught her that the most successful weddings please guests as much as they do the bride and groom.)
It helps that Blum is funny. “I think that people need a lot of humor in the midst of spending their life savings and fighting with everyone they know,” she says. (See? Funny.) It also helps, big time, that she isn’t resentful of the wealth and celebrity that swirl around her on a daily basis. In fact, Blum enjoys working with her wealthy clients, many of whom are self-made: “It’s fun to be around people who are going to order great wines and always have a car for you or a private plane,” she admits. “At the same time, I understand that I didn’t pay for all that; it’s not the way I live. But I can still recognize it as a great treat when it happens.”
She did take a private plane to her own 2025 nuptials in St. Barts to longtime love Destin Coleman, a veterinary nurse Blum describes as “a delicious, kind, smart, interesting person.” But the flight was a wedding gift from a friend. Aside from that, her own affair was, in many ways, the antithesis of a typical Marcy Blum event. The attendees were 14 of the couple’s closest friends, and planning the wedding, Blum says, took all of “a minute — maybe two minutes.” Still, what she loves about her wedding and the ones she plans for her clients are pretty much the same. “When you see something you invented actually happening, it’s really, really exciting. It’s like, I can’t believe I thought of that, and it’s really working. Nobody died. That’s fun.”
Marcy Blum’s Favorite Wedding Moments
When Billy Joel took the stage at his own wedding and started to sing. “That was not planned,” Blum says.
When a groom and his groomsmen, all of whom had gone to Howard University together, surrounded the bride and serenaded her with a song from their fraternity.
When a groom fed Blum the cake before he fed the bride. Blum’s inclusion in the cake-cutting ceremony has become a tradition among her clients.
When wedding guests at Napa’s Stanley Ranch were expecting fireworks and got a fabulous custom drone show instead. (Surprise!)
When a hidden after-party tent was revealed at a Florida wedding. (Surprise!)
Marcy’s Half-Dozen Tips
These small hacks can seriously amplify the success of your big day.
1. Candles offer much more bang for the buck than flowers. Make sure that you’re allowed open flame at the venue; if not, get the highest-quality LED possible.
2. Be thoughtful about seating. Most people don’t pay attention to it, and who’s sitting with whom is very important for the energy of the event.
3. Always pass something as guests are coming in—white wine and water, say, or champagne and water—to alleviate the crunch at the bar.
4. Have the lighting in the venue checked before the event so that you know what things ar going to look like.
5. Always include some vegan/vegetarian options—not only entrees but also hors d’oeuvres.
6. Keep the toasts short and succinct. Let speakers know wel beforehand so you don’t have to yank the mic out of anyone’s hand.
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