When Hurricane Ian destroyed Kylie Morgan and Jay Allen’s wedding venue (a shipyard on the water in Fort Myers Beach), the couple postponed the October 1 ceremony and started brainstorming ways to help friends and residents in their adopted second home. “We were on top of the world, thinking we were going to get married in this place of our dreams,” says 37-year-old Jay, who competed in last year’s season of The Voice. To get Kylie’s mind off the wedding—and the destruction in Southwest Florida—he Googled “city with the nicest weather right now” for travel ideas, and New Orleans topped the list. During their Crescent City jaunt, they started planning for a relief concert at Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row in Nashville, where they live, to raise money for families displaced by the storm. “I wanted to shine a light on what was happening down there,” Jay says.
In about a month, Estero-based Felicia Gostisbehere-Couto, of Avec Moi Event Planning & Design, which specializes in “transformative wedding designs,” recreated the vision in a new locale. She adapted some of the elements from the original venue, like the catering plans with Bonita Springs’ Artichoke & Company and the tattoo-inspired black-and-white dance floor wrap and signage—to the Tuscan-inspired La Casa Toscana, which sits on a 10-acre estate in Fort Myers. “I wanted to get married in Italy—it was the dream,” 28-year-old Kylie says. “This was like our Italy in Fort Myers.”
The couple tied the knot the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which serendipitously works out to be the ideal anniversary date, since this is one of the only times of the year the couple has off from touring and other obligations. “This surpassed the ‘wedding of our dreams’ by a thousand,” Jay says. “This is the theme of life—something terrible and sad happens, but God turns it into something beautiful.”
Jay often wears black (“Think Johnny Cash, with his black button-downs and boots,” he says), and the color tied into the wedding theme. The groom’s ink-black look was from Los Angeles-based The Black Tux. The bride wore a bohemian, Italian-made gown from Maison Signore, which she found at New York City’s Kleinfeld Bridal (after trying on what felt like 70 other dresses) while filming an episode of TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress, slated to air this fall. “I didn’t want a princess ball gown. I wanted one I could dance in, one that I could do a cartwheel in—which I did in the dress on the show,” says Kylie, adding that she wanted a beachy, boho look since they were initially planning to get married by the water.
Breaking from tradition, Jay helped pick out her look (“He’s my best friend,” she says). Friend and designer Bluff Agency’s Kelly Paige, who crafts Kylie’s costumes for live shows, created a robe out of the bride’s mom’s wedding dress, and Kylie’s older sister gave her ‘something old,’ a photograph of her grandmother tied with a blue ribbon to a bouquet by Naples-based Kaleidoscope Floral. For her ‘something borrowed,’ Kylie wore the foot tassels the couple’s Fort Myers friend, lovingly referred to as ‘Mama Mary,’ wore on her wedding day.
Kylie and Jay also created a logo for the wedding. The upside-down triangle dictated the ceremony’s design and symbolized their union, since their hometowns are roughly 700 miles from one another and 700 miles from Nashville, their current home. They realized the symmetry one year when they were mapping out Thanksgiving plans. The black theme continued through the whiskey-caramel cake and the dance floor—a centerpiece of the event that stretched across the main reception space.
An on-site tattoo artist marked the couple’s love in ink. They both got the ceremony logo and words ‘Til Death’ matching on their arms, adding to Jay’s collection of 113 tattoos. They also performed songs they wrote for each other during the reception. “Singing is their love language,” Felicia says. Jay sang his love song as a duet with Kylie’s younger sister, Raylee. They only rehearsed once in the bathroom before performing it that day. “I love them both so much, I didn’t know who to look at,” Kylie says.
Despite the lovebirds postponing the nuptials and planning an entirely new wedding in a month, they both believe it was a blessing in disguise: “People say if it rains on your wedding day, it’s good luck, and we had a hurricane,” Jay says. “God definitely had his thumb on it.”
Photography by Hunter Berry
