admin Sarah Spellings and Donald “Don” Rhodes’s relationship began with a little white lie. In 2017 Sarah, Vogue’s fashion news editor, spied a cute guy on her friend Katherine’s Instagram Story. She promptly DMed asking for a setup. Katherine responded with an enthusiastic yes—should they all hang out as a group? “Turns out, despite Katherine telling me all week how excited Don was to meet me, he didn’t know I was showing up until five minutes before I arrived,” Sarah recalls.
Katherine’s gamble worked. The two began to date—even when, four months later, Don moved back to his home country of Australia. After two years of long-distance, he returned to New York to pursue a master’s of law. The two quickly made up for lost time: A few months later New York City shut down due to COVID-19. Don and Sarah went from being a 20-hour flight away to just 20 feet apart in their Upper West Side studio. “Extreme long distance to extreme short distance—a trial that was brought up many times during our wedding,” Sarah says.
So perhaps it was fitting that Don, now the director of compliance for the Center for Popular Democracy, proposed two years later at their second apartment together in Bed-Stuy. “I got home from work, and the apartment was suspiciously clean, and there was a jewelry box next to the stuffed lion he got me when we were doing long distance between New York and Sydney,” Sarah says. Inside was a ring designed by Daniela Cardenas at Gemmita.
A Dallas native, Sarah always knew she wanted to marry in the Texas Hill Country. She and Don quickly settled on Camp Lucy, a resort and vineyard in Dripping Springs.
With the help of Madison Didier with Pearl Events, the couple held a Lone Star State–meets–Sydney wedding in mid April. On Friday night Sarah’s godparents, aunts, and family friends (“all women who basically raised me,” she notes) threw them a welcome party at Moonshine Grill in Austin. She wore a custom white shirtdress by Interior paired with gold cowboy boots by Miron Crosby. (While most would consider the latter a style statement, Sarah, like any good Texan, insists they’re a staple: “They’re something I can wear over and over,” she says.) Guests ate shrimp corn dogs and fried green tomatoes, while for dessert, they served koala- and kangaroo-shaped iced cookies. “Since Don is Australian and we’d have a lot of people making the long trip to Austin, we wanted to give them a party worth all those miles,” Sarah says.
