Alexandra Riley wouldn’t have gone ahead with her Jan. 11 wedding if it hadn’t been for her mother, Bev Lowe. The Los Angeles wildfires were raging. Santa Rosa Valley, Calif., where she planned to marry Lucas Warrer Nilsson, a fellow soccer player, was out of the danger zone, but many of the couple’s 120 guests were still in it.
“My mom took all my hesitation and worry and doubt and completely brushed it aside,” said Ms. Riley, who has played in five World Cups. It was a show of fortitude that Ms. Riley, 37, of Canoga Park, Calif., had come to expect from her mother.
Those who don’t know Ms. Lowe might have been surprised by the enthusiasm she and her husband, John Riley, mustered for their daughter’s wedding: Five days before the event, their Pacific Palisades home of 41 years burned to the ground.
As Los Angeles figures out the long and uncertain recovery from the destructive fires, the fortitude of couples and the local professionals who help them put on weddings has been on display, too. Jessica Carrillo, the executive producer and creative director of Art & Soul Events, a Los Angeles wedding planning and event design company, thinks there’s a uniquely Los Angeles quality to the acts of generosity and compassion she’s seen in recent weeks.
“We’re a networking, relationship-building city here,” she said. Since the fires broke out, a Facebook group, LA Wedding Vendors & Creatives, for colleagues that she started in 2015 has been a hotbed of links, some to GoFundMe campaigns for florists who lost their homes or wedding photographers whose cameras have burned, others to venues that have agreed to host weddings displaced by the fires.
Ariel Nunez, a Malibu wedding photographer, has seen colleagues offer to fill in at shoots and open their studios to those who need a place to charge batteries. Keeping tabs on their generosity has given her something to focus on during her husband’s deployments as a firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department. “It’s been incredible to see how the community has risen up,” she said.
Some business owners, like Cordelia Culver, are seeing their communities rise for a second or third time. Ms. Culver’s catering company, Chef Cordelia, runs two event spaces, the Lodge at Malibou Lake, in Agoura Hills, and Wrensmoor Castle, in Alhambra. In 2018, she and Ms. Carrillo worked together to find new venues for couples whose weddings at the lodge were suddenly canceled when the Woolsey Fires, in and around Malibu, broke out.
“That experience taught us how to move quickly in an emergency and show up for each other,” Ms. Carrillo said. Those lessons were reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic, when weddings were in a state of flux because of laws prohibiting large gatherings. “I’m more practiced now,” Ms. Culver said. But this time still feels different.
Now, “we’re in this pocket of fear and devastation of, Where will it end and how will it end?” Ms. Carrillo said. “The scale of these fires is so much more massive and widespread.” “More of L.A. really gets it now,” Ms. Culver added.
If there’s a silver lining for couples, it’s that the wedding season is at a lull in January and February. Ms. Culver held a Jan. 11 wedding at Wrensmoor Castle despite complications like downed trees in the area and smoky air, though she’s usually cleaning out storerooms or refinishing tables this time of year, she said. Ms. Carrillo had no weddings on the books in January. Ms. Nunez was supposed to photograph a bar mitzvah, but that was postponed when the synagogue set to host it was turned into an evacuation center.
Ms. Culver said inquiries from couples with weddings scheduled later this year at venues damaged by the fires have started trickling in. But “it’s still kind of early,” she said. “Right now, we’re looking at this ugly scar across the city. It’s going to take time before anything’s clear.”
Ms. Riley and Mr. Warrer Nilsson’s Santa Rosa Valley wedding was at the home of a former professional soccer player, Lauren Holiday. Ms. Riley’s parents, who evacuated two hours before they lost their home to the Palisades Fire, are temporarily living there.
“My dad has mismatched socks and his bow tie,” said Ms. Riley, a defender for Angel City FC, a National Women’s Soccer League team. Mr. Warrer Nilsson, 36, previously played in his native Sweden and is now a soccer coach. “Besides their important documents, among the few things they packed were their clothes for the wedding,” Ms. Riley said.
Guests who lost their homes borrowed suits and shoes for the couple’s wedding. Not everything fit. A neighbor paired his suit pants with a T-shirt. But “everyone was like, ‘This wedding is happening. We’re going to get drunk and dance and hug each other,’” Ms. Riley said. An event built around love and unity had provided something they could look forward to, especially Ms. Riley’s parents. “It was giving them so much light,” she said. “It kept them busy and excited. My dad knows how to bring the vibes.”
Danica Pinner and Nick Campbell weren’t sure they could manufacture that kind of uplift when they married on Jan. 12 in Los Angeles at the El Rey Theater. A few days before, “we were like, I have no idea how we’re going to do this,” Mr. Campbell said. “You could see the smoke in the distance.”
Like Ms. Riley, Mr. Campbell had lost his childhood home in the Pacific Palisades days earlier. His mother, Lesli Linka Glatter, was living with him and Ms. Pinner in the Van Nuys neighborhood. But the couple, both 33 and musicians, had 182 guests to consider (which ultimately became closer to 165), some who had flown in for the wedding. They’re glad they didn’t cancel. “My mom convinced us that people need some sort of outlet for community right now,” Mr. Campbell said. “And that’s how it felt. There were a lot of hugs, a lot of joy in the room.”
The fires brought additional meaning to the Jan. 14 wedding of Alex Schmider and Kat Klein at a relative’s home in Santa Barbara, too. Mr. Schmider and Ms. Klein who live north of Los Angeles and work as producers — he in documentary films and she in booking talent — initially planned to marry in 2026. But they were concerned about marriage-equality rights after the presidential election. “It felt important to get married expeditiously,” said Mr. Schmider, who is a transgender man.
The couple planned a wedding for 130 guests in two months. Nearly everyone, including friends and neighbors who had evacuated homes, showed up. That, along with the prescience of their vows, was unexpected. “I had written a week before the fires broke out, ‘We don’t know what’s to come,’” Ms. Klein said. “All we have is the certainty of the love we have for each other,” Mr. Schmider said.
Less than a week after her wedding, Ms. Riley wasn’t sure she had fully processed her family’s loss. “The grief was so much I couldn’t cry,” she said. “I think I’ll probably need some therapy.”
