Why Paulina Porizkova skipped the white dress on her wedding day

Paulina Porizkova said “I do” — but not to bridal white.
The supermodel, 61, married comedy writer Jeff Greenstein, 63, in Italy on July 3, opting for a custom wedding dress in what she described as a color “beyond color.”
The choice to eschew tradition had little to do with the virginal connotations of white, she told Vogue, and more to do with her day job.
The Czech-born beauty logged years in bridal white during her 1980s modeling heyday, appearing on the cover of Brides magazine on several occasions and fronting Estée Lauder’s Beautiful fragrance campaign in a veil and white gown.
For her own nuptials, she tapped House of Gilles — the New York couture atelier run by Gilles Mendel and his daughter, Chloe Mendel Corgan — to create something more personal and unique.
“I wanted the color to be sort of a not color. Something ineffable and elusive, so you couldn’t say ‘she wore a yellow dress’ or ‘she wore a pink dress,’” she explained to Vogue.
For direction, Porizkova pointed to two screen-siren references: Grace Kelly’s blue gown in “To Catch a Thief” and Lauren Hutton’s Halston at the 1975 Oscars.
The gambit worked. At the reception, one attendee informed the bride her dress matched a color she’d glimpsed while taking recreational ketamine: “‘the color of element.’ Meaning a color that cannot be described, like water.”
The final design was both form-fitting and diaphanous, showing off the results of the workouts Porizkova said she kicked up “like 10 notches,” while also flowing “like water” — another request she made of the designers.
Her only jewelry was a pair of teardrop earrings her sons gifted her for her 60th birthday, though she added a veil, also by House of Gilles, and a matching fabric flower in her hair.
The groom went bespoke, too, commissioning a blue wool suit cut for his 6-foot-7 frame.
The wedding at Villa Crespi in Orta San Giulio is a second marriage for both. Porizkova was wed to Cars frontman Ric Ocasek from 1989 until their 2018 separation; he died in 2019 at 75.
She and Greenstein, who matched on a dating app in 2023, got engaged in the Czech Republic in July 2025.