Carlota Laveria had one dress at her wedding. And four looks. That is not wordplay - it is the solution to a problem every bride knows and few say out loud: the wedding lasts twelve hours, and the dress is cut for one.

ACB league basketball player Xabi Lopez-Arostegui and Carlota Laveria married on the eleventh of August at Masia Mas Sendra in Baix Emporda, Girona. They met at a club in Barcelona just before the pandemic lockdown, and had been together more than five years before the wedding. So - a relationship that began when the whole world stopped.

The dress was made to measure by designer Andrea Lalanza, with detachable silk sleeves and a silk tulle cape replacing the traditional veil. For the ceremony - sleeves and cape. For the cocktail - cape and sleeves. For dinner - sleeves only. For the dancing - bare shoulder line. One dress, four stages of the evening.

"More than buying a dress, I was buying an experience I could enjoy from scratch," the bride says. She adds she had a thousand second thoughts every time she left the atelier and wanted to change the dress twenty thousand times. That is a more honest sentence than anything printed in bridal-salon catalogues.

The details were expensive but not loud: earrings with diamonds and pearls, a white gold and diamond choker, shoes with a six-centimetre heel. Bronzed natural make-up. A bun with a woven braid. Not one part of it asks to be noticed first.

The thing worth stealing for domestic use is the seating plan. Instead of a standard table of names, the couple referenced Spanish comedies about Basque and Catalan surnames, with a line to the effect that you do not need eight surnames these days - finding your own is enough. Eight tables, each named after a Basque or Catalan surname. It is a joke only the guests understand, and that is exactly why it works.

There were also two moments nobody plans. The bride forgot her bouquet and realised it was missing exactly as she had to walk down the stairs towards the altar. And the second - she gave the bouquet to her mother, while "Ay mamá" by Rigoberta Bandini played. Around here that moment has its place at every wedding and usually ends with half the hall crying loudly.

Among the guests, besides the Spaniards, there were people from France, from Belgrade and from Macedonia. The wedding was conceived as an elegant outdoor celebration inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream - white and soft tones, candles, a white piano at the centre. Exactly as much staging as the photographs need, and not so much that anybody feels like a prop.