Stella Banderas married with a bouquet of black calla lilies: "A tribute to my roots" - and in Spanish villages brides wore black until the middle of the last century

Exactly a year ago, on 18 October 2025, Stella Banderas, the daughter of Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, married Alex Gruszynski at Abadía Retuerta - a 12th-century monastery turned luxury hotel in Sardón de Duero, near Valladolid. There were around 200 guests. What people talked about most was the bouquet: black calla lilies.

"A tribute to my roots," she said of the day. The black wasn't only in her hands. The bridesmaids wore it too, among them her half-sister Dakota Johnson, and the flower on Antonio Banderas's lapel was dark as well.

The dress was designed by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, after nine months of work: a lace and chiffon bodice, a sweetheart neckline, bell sleeves and a three-metre veil. The diamond earrings were family heirlooms.

Stella isn't the first. Pilar Rubio, the wife of footballer Sergio Ramos, also carried black calla lilies in 2019, and Avril Lavigne married in a black dress with black roses in 2013. Strictly speaking, "black" calla lilies usually aren't black: varieties such as Schwarzwalder are actually deep purple.

Dark flowers are associated with mystery, elegance, rebellion and transformation. There's no widespread superstition that they bring bad luck at a wedding. And history is closer to Stella than it seems: in parts of the Basque Country, Navarre and rural Spain, brides married in black until the middle of the 20th century. The white wedding dress, which we now consider timeless, was popularised by Queen Victoria only in 1840.

The trend has numbers behind it, too. Pinterest's 2024 report showed strong growth in searches for "dark fantasy", dark-romantic décor and Gothic-Victorian weddings.

Would a Macedonian bride dare walk into the wedding hall with a black bouquet - and how many comments would she collect before the first oro dance?