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and Kanye West’s 2014 wedding kick-started a trend that,
unlike cut
lowers, will not die. “Every time I think it’s over,
we’ll put some scene up with a couch and a loral wall,” says
Marcy Blum, a prominent Manhattan-based party planner.
“And that’s the thing everyone is Instagramming.”
In March
2018, Leatham designed Khloé Kardashian’s baby
shower at the Hotel Bel-Air, an afair for 80 guests that included
more than 20,000 carnations hanging from the ceiling. Roses
were imported from Ecuador and displayed alongside huge
moss-covered elephants, another Leatham signature. “I’m kind
of the New Age Noah from Noah’s Ark,” he says.
The inluence from these celebrity events ilters to the
masses: Call it trickle-down loranomics. According to Kate
Penn, chief executive officer of the Society of American
Florists, even brides working with a limited budget crave
the kind of Instagrammable moment Leatham specializes
in. “Some brides will put all their money into the really big
showstopper piece,” she says. “If they’ve got this fabulous loral
chandelier, they’ll do something more modest for the tables.
They want something that’s going to get people talking.”
As his work has been posted and reposted, clients have
gotten more demanding—and Leatham more selective. He
prefers not to meet with a bride until four months before the
wedding. “Brides lay in bed drunk on Instagram and change
their minds,” he gripes. But he concedes people are willing
to spend a little extra these days. “I’ll say, ‘If you want this
you have to spend an extra 20 grand,’ ” he says. “They under-
stand if they see something wow, they’ll need to spend some-
thing more wow.”
When asked if brides are concerned with ecological
impact, Leatham scofs. “What are you going to do with all
of those lowers? Float them down the Thames River?” he
asks. “The last thing brides want to worry about after the
wedding is where you’re going to take all the lowers.”
Leatham makes this observation efortlessly, with charm
and a corn-fed smile that make his musings seem less catty
and more funny. He admits that for his own 2017 wedding, to
Teen Wolf
star Colton Haynes, he was his most demanding cli-
ent. “Listen,” Leatham warned his then-iance. “If you’re mar-
rying Jef Leatham, you either have to do something where
you get married naked on the beach in Cabo with nothing—
it’s just you, a horse, and sand—or you go big.”
Jenner oiciated at the wedding at the Parker, a hotel
in Palm Springs, Calif., before stars like Sofía Vergara, Joe
Manganiello, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Melanie Griffith, and
Chelsea Clinton. “Nothing prepared me for walking into that
space,” Jenner recalls. “He had put up this wall of green and all
these red roses sprinkled throughout. It was the most roman-
tic, beautiful setting I think I had ever seen.”
The wedding was covered by tabloids and splashed across
Instagram. It was, in the end, an expansion of Leatham’s grow-
ing brand. In March he’ll open a new studio in the Four Seasons
in Philadelphia. This winter he’ll orchestrate a wedding in
Mumbai for one of the richest families in the world, which
will require several weeks in India and 45 employees. In a sign
of his increasing inluence, a lower market in Holland recently
named an orchid after him. It’s something Leathammight call
a “loral orgasm dream,” if he only got a cut of the sales.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY JEFF LEATHAM
DECOR
Bloomberg Pursuits
Clockwise, from left: Just some of the more than 1 million roses and orchids Leatham used at a June 2017 wedding in Blenheim Palace; one of his dramatic state-
ment pieces in a single color, for the entrance to an event in Vienna; roses and hydrangeas set afloat in a pool for a party in Istanbul