Tara Summers’s childhood home in Chelsea was the scene of countless legendary London parties – so much so that she previously committed tales of her parents’ fabulous social whirl (reguar faces included the likes of Jack Nicholson, Bianca Jagger and Tara’s godmother Diane von Furstenberg) to print, in a 2016 story for British Vogue.
“From the moment I was born there were parties,” the actor wrote at the time. Little wonder, then, that Tara’s wedding – staged over the May bank holiday in Marrakech – was one for the ages, complete with rooftop cocktails at El Fenn, a rehearsal dinner overseen by the revered Argentine chef Francis Mallmann (Mallmann and Tara’s father, art dealer Martin Summers, owned neighbouring homes in Uruguay), a palanquin ride for the bride and groom and a Fleetwood Mac cover from guest Sienna Miller.
“It’s a multi-cultural situation,” says the bride, who is speaking to Vogue fresh from a pre-wedding facial a few days before boarding her flight to Morocco, where she is set to marry trader Anthony Shrubb in the Japanese garden – complete with tea house and soribashi bridge – at her father’s home, christened Maison Martin. “My dad moved to Marrakech about 12 years ago, and where he lives in the Ourika Valley is right under the Atlas Mountains, it’s kind of an oasis in the desert,” she says [Tara’s parents divorced in 1986]. “My half sister is Japanese, so we’ll be incorporating a traditional san-san-kudo wedding ritual – you drink from three different sake cups nine times… and try not to get too drunk.”
The officiant is Tara’s friend Dhani Harrison – only son of the late Beatle George – “and then we’re going to be lifted up and carried by palanquins, which is a very Arabic tradition. We’ve chosen a song from Paul Simon’s Graceland, ‘Under African Skies’, to play at the ‘you may now kiss the bride’ moment, to reflect our location. Later we’ll have an incredible Saharan blues band, and a shawarma guy will arrive around 1am!”
The couple’s love story is every bit as fabulously unconventional as the wedding. It began when Tara, who was living in New York at the time (where she jokes she’d encountered “many a frog”), was forced to isolate after getting Covid during a trip home to London for Christmas. “I was feeling very sorry for myself having a solo mince pie, and I decided to go on English Hinge to distract myself,” she recalls. “And there he was!” The bride and groom exchanged messages on the app, but then Tara left quarantine and “sort of forgot about him. He’d given me his number, but I didn’t message him for 10 days as I was better and gallivanting around… then suddenly I thought, oh my God: that guy!”