The Party King
Preston Bailey is the go-to wedding planner for the stars. He tells The Hollywood Reporter Australia the role this country played in helping him rise to the top of the industry.
Preston Bailey knows how to get a party started.
So when Wedded Wonderland, Australia’s largest digital wedding events platform, wanted to inject some wow factor into its fourth Wedded World showcase, the first edition since COVID forced the industry into hibernation, the Panamanian-American celebrity wedding planner was its first port of call.
“When everything started coming back [after COVID], it was like a rush, everyone wanted to get married, all of the venues were completely booked, we were turning away work, it was crazy,” reflects New York-based Bailey, sitting in Crown Sydney’s rooftop CIRQ bar and lounge in late May, 24 hours ahead of a masterclass for 300 Wedded Wonderland VIP customers and partners that he would deliver in Crown’s Pearl Ballroom.
Accompanied by a runway show featuring gowns from a bridal lineup headed up by Georges Hobeika, the Beirut-based couturier who has shown his collections in Paris for 25 years, and since 2017 as a guest member of the hard-to-crack official haute couture schedule, Bailey’s keynote was the pinnacle moment of an immersive two-day luxury wedding activation.
Bailey is the architect of some of the planet’s biggest celebrity knees-ups, with a client list that spans, to name a few, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Serena Williams, Eva Longoria, Mariah Carey, Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and, in less controversial times, the Trumps. Bailey has done three Trump weddings, including Donald and Melania’s in 2005.
But his biggest client is Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s second-wealthiest person. Bailey was the go-to planner for the weddings of all three of his children, Akash, Isha and Anant. The opulence of the latter’s 2024 nuptials to Radhika Merchant dominated the news cycle for months, with estimations of costs ranging from US$600 million to US$1 billion, reportedly making it the most expensive wedding in modern history.
Extraordinary experiences are the hallmark of luxury weddings, Bailey told his Wedded World audience.
“This is a market that has travelled all over the world, that has seen everything and they want something that is fresh and different, so that is one number one rule and entertainment is a big part of the luxury market right now, getting some kind of a name, I think that’s essential,” says Bailey. “Secondly, service. They want to be able to reach somebody by phone at all times.”
He also highly recommends no longer than six months as the ideal planning window. Let’s call it a cooling-off period.
“I’ve had at least three celebrities wanting that the plan go forward a year before and guess what? They broke up before the actual wedding. So, it’s always good to have six months. This way, you can study everything.”
Built by Australian billionaire James Packer and opened in late 2020, Crown Sydney, as the venue for Wedded World 2026, represented something of a full-circle moment for Bailey, who credits Packer’s June 2007 wedding to Erica Baxter on the Côte d’Azur as a career watershed.
The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc was the wedding’s primary backdrop, its majestic “Grande Allée”, a 200-metre pathway lined with century-old pines that leads down to the edge of the Mediterranean, serving as “the longest aisle in history”, according to Bailey. The bride wore Christian Dior haute couture and guests included Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch and Michael Bublé.
“It was one of the events that broke me into the luxury market in a big way. It was amazing,” he recalls. “I always give Australian credit for that one.”
Founded by Sydney entrepreneur Wendy Daoud El-Khoury in 2014 as an online wedding platform, today Wedded Wonderland boasts a social media audience of almost two million and services 20,000 couples a year through a team of 70 working across 54 international markets.
“We were really the first social media wedding platform in the world,” says Daoud El-Khoury, whose own career watershed came in the form of witnessing the viral buzz over Akash Ambani’s blowout pre-wedding festivities in St Moritz in February 2019, which sparked the beginning of a serious dialogue between Wedded Wonderland and tourism bodies in markets including the Middle East and Spain.
Fuelled by social media, Millennials and Gen Z, the destination wedding is one of the fastest-growing categories of the US$700 billion global wedding market, which is projected to grow to US$1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights data.
“We realized that our industry is so much larger than being seen as small businesses that play with cute flowers,” she says.
Still at the top of his game at 77, Bailey has no plans of slowing down any time soon.
“I think the moment we stop creating or inventing, we start dying because there’s really nothing to keep you going,” notes Bailey, who reveals he is, nevertheless, itching to juggle all those NDAs and knock out a memoir at some point.
“I’d have to be retired to do that,” he quips. “I’ve accumulated some amazing stories, including being fired a couple of times.”
A big one that got away in recent years? Brooklyn Beckham’s April 2022 wedding to Nicola Peltz.
“One of the planners that I recommended for the job was not agreeing with the family. Like, a month before, they said, ‘Listen, we love you personally, but this is not going to work out,’” he recalls.
“It took me a month of eating ice cream to get over it.”
This story first appeared in Issue #1 of The Hollywood Reporter Australia (June 2026)