If you’re going to bring the Candy Bar to Bedford, bring it on. Do it big, over the top.” That was the advice Ralph Lauren gave to his daughter, Dylan, when she was planning her June 11 wedding to hedge-fund founder/partner Paul Arrouet. Dylan’s Candy Bar, of course, is Dylan’s mini empire of candy stores (with five locations in New York and Florida, and two more opening, one in Miami and one in L.A. next year), and there were indeed touches throughout, from the roses the colors of the store’s logo in the nine bridesmaids’ bouquets to the vast smorgasbord of confections in silver bowls the 314 guests could bag themselves to the engraved chocolate bars indicating table seating.
The event was held at 6:45 p.m. on Ricky and Ralph Lauren’s 300-acre Westchester County estate on a gray, wet day. After the processional, which included Dylan’s brother Andrew and his blue heeler–Australian Shepherd mix dog, Cinch, the bride emerged from the French Beaux-Arts house in a handmade duchesse-satin, silk-tulle, and georgette embroidered dress with tiered train, designed by her father. To Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” and Sartori and Quarantotto’s “Time to Say Good-Bye,” the 37-year-old was escorted by her mother, in a gold strapless long dress with matte gold in a patchwork motif, and father, in a white double-breasted dinner jacket, to the chuppah. Neighbor Martha Stewart, in a green-and-gold Naeem Khan long evening dress, helped me identify the white flowers on the elegant ivy-drenched chuppah: hydrangeas, lilies, and roses. After a 40-minute ceremony, during which officiant Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove described Dylan as “sort of an Energizer Bunny, full of details,” the newlyweds recessed from the tent—a proud Ralph picking up his daughter’s train—to the limestone path leading to the main house.
Three weeks before the big day, Dylan had flown out to L.A. to show me the site of her next outpost, in the Original Farmers Market at Fairfax and Third, a location that took her eight years to find. “I want to create my own Disneyland of candy,” she told me. Her 60-employee company, which was founded in 2001 and has drawn the likes of First Lady Michelle Obama and her daughters, Taylor Swift, and Tom Cruise and Suri, plans future stores in Aspen and Hong Kong. There’s a Dylan’s Candy Bar Barbie, a Dylan’s Candy Bar edition of Hasbro’s Candy Land game, a Dylan’s Candy Bar Maclaren baby stroller, and a book, Dylan’s Candy Bar: Unwrap Your Sweet Life, in which she writes, “Candy is childhood, the best and bright moments you wish could have lasted forever.” (“Pure Imagination,” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which her father screened for her when she was six, is her personal mantra.)
“She’s created a business that is rooted in happiness,” says Jamie Rosen, a bridesmaid and friend since the two were art-history majors at Duke University. After they spent a semester in Rome together living in a convent, Rosen would accompany Dylan on treks across Europe, where the future entrepreneur was already seeking out Chupa Chups lollipops in Florence or a specialty chocolatier in Lucerne. “Her brand is a seamless extension of herself.”
Fresh off an early East Coast flight, Dylan met me at Joan’s on Third cafe, wearing a lemon-yellow shirt, jeans, and silver braided thong sandals on a small Louis heel. We had become good friends more than a year earlier in Paris after her father received the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur from President Nicolas Sarkozy. She has always been the effervescent Lauren sibling among Andrew, 42, and David, 39, about to wed Lauren Bush (“I’m really looking forward to having a relationship with her,” says Dylan). As the only girl, she was a bit of a tomboy into outdoor sports, and her style hasn’t changed much from the jeans-and-sneakers uniform of university days.
Over a lunch of artichoke leaves, asparagus, and lemonade, she showed me three huge wedding-inspiration boards that had been neatly packed in between cardboard. The decor for dinner was inspired by the Sèvres blue of a Russian porcelain service de table that Dylan saw in St. Petersburg, the closest she could get to her favorite color, turquoise, while keeping with the eighteenth-century French-court theme. The tables with silk-shantung skirts, would be decorated with enormous bouquets of roses, delphiniums, phlox, and peonies on gilt wrought-iron stands. Her matron of honor, Nicole Levinson, a friend from Dalton, and bridesmaids would wear dresses of different styles designed by her father in Candy Bar–logo colors (and specially made Spanx if they so opted). “I also was inspired by a New York Times front page of one of my father’s spring/summer collections where they showed the finale lineup of all those vivid colors of satin evening dresses.”
Dylan proposed a hike up Runyon Canyon, a popular trail in the middle of Hollywood. “I work out two hours a day, five to six days a week,” she said. “In fact, I wrote my book entirely on the StairMaster!” When I asked an assistant to find out where she was registered, imagine my surprise to learn the couple had requested fitness equipment or gift cards to download music. (She and Arrouet, 41, are building a gym in their New York City apartment.)
She has what Rosalind Russell embodied in My Sister Eileen: She takes control while making everything look easy. We spent 40 minutes walking up the hill, I pausing often to lean against a fence or post, she encouraging and applauding my efforts. “For a while after college, I was thinking of becoming a fitness trainer, and I am a certified aqua trainer,” she said. “If I wasn’t doing candy, I’d want to create the best rescue animal–shelter organization. Otherwise, the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson were so much a part of my childhood, and Janet and I have become friends. So my second dream job would be backup singer for Janet Jackson!”
At the reception in the Dylan-designed Marie-Antoinette plein air pavilion, with its enormous crystal chandeliers and swagged ceiling, I was looking forward to speaking with Phyllis Monahan, the groom’s mother, who runs a mentoring program at Savannah College of Art and Design. Wearing a one-shouldered navy-blue silk-jersey dress Ralph had made for her, she held my hand as she talked about her new daughter-in-law. “She’s the most thoughtful, sensitive, kind person,” she said, beaming. “Paul and Dylan have known each other for five years. She always comes to my home in Savannah for Thanksgiving. Head and shoulders, she was most assuredly my all-time favorite of my son’s girlfriends.”
The menu was chilled carrot soup, butter lettuce, cucumber, and radish salad, and spring lamb chops or miso cod, and the six-tiered Sylvia Weinstock cake featured replicas of the bride’s childhood pet bunnies, Chocolate and Vanilla, standing on hind legs. Dylan’s love for rabbits was evident—two huge rabbit topiaries held sentry duty by the pool; the butter pats for bread were in the shape of tiny bunnies. Ricky toasted her daughter: “My little rabbit girl . . . You were such a happy child. I remember walking down a road in Montauk, and we were skipping and dancing, and you were turning cartwheels. You were always like a joyful little circus walking down the road with me. In your new life, may you continue to do cartwheels.”
The Laurens, who themselves have been married 46 years, and the newlyweds stopped at every table to thank guests, including Bruce Weber and Nan Bush, for coming. Ricky was overjoyed at having two children marry in the same year. “It’s like a fashion show,” she said. “You finish one, then on to the next.”
“I cried today about the rain. Was it OK?” the bride asked me when she came by. But things had been planned for the weather. Waiters in white Spencer jackets held white umbrellas for guests, puddles on the pavilion’s wood floors were quickly toweled dry, and there were tables stacked with cashmere scarves. The first songs the band played were Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” and even before the first course was served, the dance floor was in high-octane overdrive. By the time the main course arrived, it was past 11:00 p.m. Ralph led Dylan in a Sinatra-meets-Astaire dance, to “The Way You Look Tonight,” later telling me, “I sang with Frank once at a party!” Spotting Rosen, I asked her if Dylan had the bridesmaids work out at the rehearsal dinner the night before. “No,” she replied, “but she had us pumping our arms before we walked out onto the lawn!”