Every bride knows this arithmetic: the gown is perfect for the church, impossible for dinner and a disaster for dancing. The usual solution reads - two dresses, double the bill. The Catalan bride Carlota Llavería started from the opposite assumption: one dress, four looks.

She entrusted designer Andrea Lalanza with a halter-neck, mermaid-silhouette model. The whole trick is that the parts come off. For the ceremony the dress had detachable silk sleeves and a silk tulle shawl. For the cocktail hour the shawl came off. For dinner only the sleeves remained. For dancing - the bare halter. „I wanted one dress for the whole wedding”, she said. That is not a fashion statement, that is logistics.

The wedding was held in Baix Empordà, at the Catalan masia Mas Sendra - a traditional country house with large gardens. The organisers spread the ceremony, the cocktail hour and the banquet across different open-air spaces, keeping the interior for dancing. The banquet was inspired by „A Midsummer Night's Dream”: white, delicate linen fabrics, dimmed lighting, a great many candles and a white grand piano as the focal point.

The make-up was in earthy, bronze tones, with brown shadow and lips - a natural choice she considered closer to herself than classic pink or red. The hair was gathered up, with a braid wound around it, following the line of the dress and surviving the summer heat of the Empordà. The earrings and choker were diamonds and pearls, and the shoes - pointed courts with a six-centimetre heel.

The best detail of the whole wedding, though, is neither the dress nor the decor. The groom is the basketball player Xabi López-Arostegui, a Basque. The bride is Catalan. The seating plan referenced the films „Eight Basque Surnames” and „Eight Catalan Surnames”, with the message that today you do not need eight surnames - just find your own. Eight tables carried surnames from both sides.

Guests travelled from France, Macedonia, Belgrade, Madrid, Málaga, Getxo, Bilbao, Guadalajara, Barcelona and Valencia - a list that is a direct consequence of the groom's basketball career and of how far it took him.

The two emotional moments were the reading of the vows and the point when Carlota gave a bouquet to her mother while „Ay mamá” by Rigoberta Bandini played. Later she gave her own bouquet to her sister - a gesture that was not in the plan, and precisely for that reason the hardest one to get through. Back home a wedding is measured by the number of guests and by what was served. This one was measured by what people felt - which is harder to organise and impossible to photograph.