Bride marries in robe, slippers and rollers for legal ceremony

Ashleigh Stanley made the new split-ceremony bride feel entirely of the moment: for the legal part of her wedding, she wore a white robe, slippers and hair rollers, then saved a white off-the-shoulder gown for the larger celebration. At Llanerch Vineyard in Hensol, in the Vale of Glamorgan, the 29-year-old married her childhood sweetheart, Jake Stanley, also 29, in a look that treated the courthouse-style moment as its own category of bridal dress rather than a stripped-back version of the main event.

The legal ceremony on April 24, 2026 lasted about 10 minutes, intimate enough to feel almost backstage, with Ashleigh makeup-free and Jake in a black Under Armour top, shorts and white trainers. Her mother, Jake’s mother and Ashleigh’s daughter wore pink bridal pyjamas, while the fathers and brothers dressed casually, turning the small ceremony into a family-wide exercise in relaxed, coordinated dress. Venue staff reportedly said it was their first dressing-gown wedding, which feels less like a novelty than an early sign of how couples are rewriting the visual language of marriage.

Ashleigh said she chose the dressed-down look because she would be in her pyjamas much of married life and wanted to give her husband a “reality check” about what that actually looks like. It was a joke with styling intelligence behind it: the robe and rollers made the legal ceremony feel playful, personal and deliberately unglamorous, while the later gown restored the sweep and polish expected from the bigger celebration. The two looks did different jobs, and that is precisely why the outfit worked.

The decision to split the wedding into two chapters came after the couple, who had been together for 13 years, changed plans from a larger civil ceremony for about 150 guests. They could not use the Welsh hymn Calon Lân in the civil service because it is religious, and Ashleigh had wanted to walk down the aisle to it in honor of her late grandmother, whose favorite song it was. The date also carried extra weight: it would have been her grandmother’s 100th birthday, and Ashleigh said her grandmother had dementia for 10 years but still knew every word of the hymn by heart.

After the legal ceremony, Ashleigh had her makeup done and her hair curled for the second celebration, where the off-the-shoulder gown delivered the full bridal effect. At Llanerch Vineyard, which bills itself as the only vineyard hotel wedding venue in Wales, the day moved neatly from dressing gown to ceremony dress, proving that the modern bride can save spectacle for later without losing any of the style.