This Shoe Designer Bride Made Three Pairs Of Heels For Her Dahlia-Themed Wedding In Her Childhood Home
IZIE designer Isabella Bowie and James Nisbet’s meet-cute was Western-themed. Crossing paths at caterer pal Ed’s rodeo-style party, the shoe obsessive and outdoor enthusiast couldn’t have known they would hit it off to such an extent that they’d end up doing long-distance from Edinburgh, where James’s accountancy work took him, to London, the location of Bowie’s footwear business, for a while. Or that birthday boy Ed would ultimately go on to serve the food at their wedding.
The proposal came close to what was by then their shared home in Highbury Fields during a December evening walk. “It was actually on the same bench as our first date,” says Bowie, adding that the following morning they escaped to Florence – her favourite place and the origin of her business, after she worked in an Italian atelier there at just 18. “We told everyone on Sunday night when we flew home,” Bowie says of keeping the delicious news their secret for a special weekend. By October 2026, they were wed.
“I love autumn,” says the bride. “The colours, that feeling of moving into a new chapter, and my parents got married the same weekend 38 years ago.” It made perfect sense, then, to go home to Leicestershire, where her mother – who would take on an integral role as wedding planner and host – and sister had both married. Mrs Bowie then enlisted her own mother, Isabella’s granny, to start growing flowers in earnest, as the family mission became to “source everything from within a close radius”.
Burnt orange and fiery red dahlias – most grown in the gardens Isabella grew up in, some picked from around Keythorpe Hall – became the blueprint of the wedding décor, with the Bowies embarking on rambles to source additional foliage to bring the red-lined Bohemia Canvas marquee in the backyard to life.
As a British independent business owner herself, the bride knew she had to walk down the aisle wearing an English designer. She found her dress on Sloane Street within moments of stepping into Emilia Wickstead’s boutique: “I just sort of zipped it up and it was perfect.” The demure ivory lace number, with its matching scarf overlay that could be styled one way for the ceremony and another for the reception, was a vehicle to creating some seriously great shoes. With a Wickstead offcut in hand, Bowie set about crafting a pair of delicate bridal mules mirroring the same scalloped detail, with the couple’s initials, plus their wedding date, as her “something blue” inside.
“My husband got married in a kilt, so I thought, ‘Why not?’, and then made two pairs of shoes – sandals to dance in and boots for the next day – in his tartan,” she continues, adding that the entire process convinced her to launch a bespoke bridal arm of IZIE. “You do it for your dress, so why not your shoes?”
Isabella’s childhood hairdresser, Laura Swift (“my mum used to let anyone at Nicky Clarke practice on her kids!”), finessed a soft blow dry that made Isabella feel like herself and not too “done”. Stylist friend Nicky Yates, meanwhile, suggested Sally Bahri for a no make-up make-up look that let Isabella’s granny’s earrings shine. The only other jewellery Bowie wore was her engagement ring, designed by best friend Alexandra Stileman, who reworked James’s own grandmother’s ring into something that felt resolutely her. James, meanwhile, wore a wedding necklace, made from the melted down casing of the ring. His new wife also designed bespoke silver Monty Lewis buttons – featuring a boar and an oak tree – for his black-tie jacket.
Bowie’s handwriting could be found in every detail throughout the wedding, from the stationery, bearing dahlias and thistles, to the placemats on tables named after trees (the couple got engaged under an oak), with the bride giving one last shout-out to her mother for her additional help embroidering the napkins. James, meanwhile, was in charge of the pipers, which were the perfect traditional contrast to the couple’s first dance: “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate.
