What do you wear to your wedding when the guest list exceeds 128 million? A good choice might be Becoming Jane, a body-skimming confection of tone-on-tone ivory lace dreamed up by Palm Beach-based bridal designer Hayley Paige — which happens to be the very gown worn by Eleisa Aparico, whose (entirely real) marriage to Thomas Walter was one of the most talked-about elements of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show. Paige, whose full name is Hayley Paige Gutman, knew that one of her gowns was in the running, but until she watched the show unfold on live TV, she figured it was just as likely that the stylist and the bride had chosen a dress from another designer. “I was biting my nails,” she says. And then, when she saw that the bride was beaming in Becoming Jane, the experience was nothing short of otherworldly: “It was so surreal to see it happen on a stage like that. And the fact that it was on a real bride made it so much more meaningful.”
The ensuing media coverage of the gown and its genesis was almost universally upbeat. “I really haven’t seen much negative,” Paige notes, “which is rare in the news cycle these days. It’s been like riding a wave of love and joy and positivity.” That’s the kind of press any designer would value. But for Paige, it’s felt almost life changing. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that she thought she’d lost everything that mattered in her professional life, including her social media accounts, her right to work, and her name.
From Cornell to the Bridal Aisle
For Paige, wedding design was less a professional choice than a calling. From the time her grandmother taught her to sew at six, she knew that’s what she wanted to do, thanks in part, she says, “to years of Disney princesses.” There’s something of the Disney princess in Paige herself, whose sparkly exterior belies a strong drive and a sharp intelligence — more Mulan than Sleeping Beauty. That’s true of her designs as well, their romantic and whimsical (and yes, sparkly) exteriors overlaying a strong construction. Paige graduated from Cornell with a BS in fiber science “so I learned a lot about fabric manipulation and corsetry,” she says. The Hayley Paige brand, she notes, “has this real sense of engineering behind it.”
She started honing the brand early. Not long after graduating from Cornell, she got a job with the bridal house Priscilla of Boston, where it didn’t take her long to realize that she wanted, she says, “to ring-lead my own collection.” She got that opportunity in 2011, when she was offered a position as a lead designer at JLM Couture. For nine years she worked for JLM in what she calls “creation mode: focused on creating, building collections, connecting with brides, and just being immersed in the industry.” Her signature vision began to emerge, in dresses that conveyed a sense of wonder and whimsy — and sometimes told a story as well. In the embroidery, she often included (and still does) snippets of poetry or hidden images like songbirds and butterflies (she compares these dresses to “little treasure hunts”). The names of her dresses tell a story as well: Silver Springs was inspired by the Fleetwood Mac song of the same name (“Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me”), and Sonnet 104 references Shakespeare’s celebrated love poem that begins, “To me, fair friend, you can never be old.”
A Star on the Rise
Her star rose quickly. With more than a million followers on social media, she was beloved by Millennial brides eager to shine in her sweetheart bodices and swirling skirts and heralded as one of the country’s top bridal designers. Her rise mirrored the ascent of Instagram, launched in 2010, and Paige deftly used the social media platform to expand her following to over a million and, she says, “to create a deep connection with brides.” But nothing boosted the brand like her inclusion, starting in 2016, in the TLC reality series Say Yes to the Dress, which, over 23 seasons, has followed brides of every stripe shopping for the perfect wedding dress. During her run, Paige beguiled both brides and viewers with her sparkling personality and equally effervescent creations. (The show’s highlight for Paige, a Millennial who came of age in the aughts, was designing a custom dress for Sabrina Bryan, an original member of the Disney-manufactured singing group the Cheetah Girls.) Meanwhile, Paige’s brand was attracting celebrity clients like Kelsea Ballerini, Chrissy Teigen, Carrie Underwood, and Dove Cameron. She seemed unstoppable.
But something changed in 2019, the year before her contract with JLM was due to expire. She set out to negotiate a new contract in March of that year that would reflect the significant value she felt she’d added to her brand over the preceding decade. Negotiations continued until December 2020, when JLM hit her with an unexpected lawsuit claiming she’d infringed on the Hayley Paige trademark, violated the contract’s noncompete clause, and promoted other companies without JLM’s permission.
Losing Her Name
Paige resigned and fought the suit in a number of court appearances. But in 2021 a federal judge granted JLM a preliminary injunction giving the company control of Paige’s name and social media accounts and preventing her from designing bridal apparel until August of 2022, a date that was later extended to 2027. Her response was a mixture of shock, grief, and guilt. “It was very disorienting,” she says, “and I definitely experienced grief, right away. There was a sense of real loss because up until then, I thought a name was something that couldn’t be taken. And I felt like I had done something wrong.”
What she’d done was something young creatives have been doing for as long as businesses have sought to profit from their creativity: She signed a contract without reading it carefully or hiring a lawyer to review it. Dazzled by the opportunities inherent in the agreement, she ignored the restrictions hidden in a thicket of fine print. “I think my ambition just outweighed my caution,” she says. “I definitely read the contract; I just didn’t understand much of the legalese. I didn’t understand how intellectual property worked, how trademark law and naming rights worked, and even what ‘perpetuity’ meant.”
Reclaiming Her Story
It’s a testament to Paige’s resilience that she never gave up. She continued to pursue legal channels in the hope of wresting back her name and right to work while starting a new enterprise — the shoe company She Is Cheval — that allowed her to continue to design for women, albeit in a way she’d never planned. The experience taught her, she says, “that they could litigate this all day long, but they couldn’t confiscate my imagination. And that was a pretty big point of power for me, to just command my destiny.” She also founded a nonprofit, A Girl You Might Know, to help young creatives protect their names, their rights, and their dreams through pro bono (or low bono) legal services, negotiation training, and other resources.
It turned out that Paige had more staying power than her former employer. In 2023, JLM filed for bankruptcy, and in May 2024 the company agreed that Paige could buy back her name and right to work for $263,000. (Earlier that year, a New York federal court had ruled that Paige’s social media accounts belonged to her.) A year later, in July 2025, she unveiled her comeback collection in a presentation fittingly titled “Twice Upon a Time.” It garnered raves from industry insiders and fans alike, with the Los Angeles Times hailing it as “a personal and professional triumph.” Befitting a fairy-tale rebirth, there were rhinestone bodices and swirling skirts and, in a gown appropriately titled After the Storm, clouds of rainbow-colored tulle.
Holding On to the Whimsy
Surviving the storm hasn’t dampened Paige’s gleam. “When you go through a lot of setbacks and dark times,” she says, “there’s a tendency for it to try to shake the sparkle off of you, and you feel like you’ve done something wrong and need to change who you are.” She did just the opposite, emerging more Hayley Paige than ever before. “The big message for me,” she says, “is to hold on to the whimsy and not feel too hardened by life.”
That whimsy will almost certainly be in evidence later this year when she marries her longtime fiancé, Conrad Clevlen. She hasn’t decided on a date or a dress yet, she says, “but I’ll definitely be wearing Hayley Paige” — and no doubt a whole lot of sparkle.
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