Inside Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes’s Tulsa Wedding (2024)

Actor and producer Sophia Bush met entrepreneur and real estate investor Grant Hughes on a New Year’s trip to Nicaragua almost 10 years ago. “We became fast friends but only saw each other a few times a year because both of us were traveling all of the time for work,” Sophia says. But at the start of the pandemic, the two began sharing books, articles, and philanthropic initiatives. That segued into long FaceTime sessions and, eventually, dating.

They got engaged in August of 2021 on Lake Como in Italy. “Grant booked us a sightseeing tour on a classic Riva boat and popped the question during golden hour,” Sophia remembers. “We shared the news publicly a few days later because we’d been spotted in Puglia by a group of very sweet Gen Z girls, and I watched them clock the ring on my finger. Their eyes went wide, they gasped, they looked at each other and back at me, and I knew that if we didn’t tell the world, someone else would tell the world for us.” Back at the hotel, she drafted a quick caption for an Instagram post.

Much to their surprise, their engagement story was picked up by media outlets around the world. “Happiness is apparently big news,” Sophia reflects. “And while it was lovely to be met with so much unabashed positivity—as a political activist I am all too familiar with the tendency of the internet to be abusive to women—it was also jarring. I play other people on TV for a reason.” But then she realized: If this personal news could travel so far, so fast, imagine what a wedding might do.

“When I thought about that spotlight, my activist brain turned on,” Sophia says. “Global attention is a hell of a platform, and as someone who doesn’t love attention but does love collective activism, I knew that this could be an incredible moment to spin the privilege of attention. And so I looked at Grant and said, ‘Honey. I think we should get married in Tulsa.’ He blinked. ‘Oklahoma?’ he asked. ‘Yup. Imagine what we could do if we turned our wedding into an event to showcase Tulsa: the Greenwood leaders we work with. The cultural renaissance happening there. Tech. Philanthropy. Civil rights justice. The art. The leadership. We could focus all of this attention and turn the spotlight on them.’”

Grant is from Oklahoma originally, and the couple spent much of their time in Tulsa over the pandemic. “Tulsa is a place where so much progressive justice work is happening, so much deep history has been uncovered and is at long last being honored, and so many people are building a deeply inspiring future,” Sophia says. “When thinking about the purpose of our wedding, we wanted our community that pours into us to pour into a community at large that we love and that deserves all our attention.”

Sophia and Grant enlisted Alison Events to help pull it all together. Ruth Skidmore led the team and worked alongside Bows and Arrows Flowers to execute the couple’s vision for a full weekend of events.

“It all began with welcome drinks at Lowood restaurant on Thursday night to ensure that our guests could become intimately acquainted with Tulsa and her history,” Sophia says. “On Friday, we worked with Tiffany Crutcher of the Terence Crutcher Foundation, community leader Brentom Todd, Nehemiah D. Frank of The Black Wall Street Times, and the Greenwood Cultural Center to facilitate tours of historic Greenwood. These included the entire Crutcher Foundation team speaking to the group, Dr. Crutcher leading the audience in prayer, and a walking tour through Reconciliation Park and the Greenwood Rising Museum. We then rented out Lefty’s on Greenwood for a post-tour regroup and took friends to meet Venita Cooper of Silhouette Sneakers to show some love to her business as well as Trey Taxton’s 19&21.”

Friday night, the couple wanted to host guests for a night-before evening of dinner and music so that everyone would feel like they knew each other and could really celebrate together on Saturday. For this, they gathered at Westhope, a historic Frank Lloyd Wright home in Tulsa.

The wedding took place on Saturday, June 11, 2022, at the Philbrook Museum of Art. “From the moment we got engaged, I knew what I wanted my dress to be,” Sophia says. “I’d seen a photograph of a Monique Lhuillier dress taken on Lake Como, and I had a vision of creating a personalized version of it, in what I have always thought of as a heritage print: a print of flowers from California, Oklahoma, and Italy, to honor the heritage of our families—where we come from and how we are all coming together to map where we are going.”

Sophia FaceTimed with Monique Lhuillier herself, and when she asked if this would be possible, the designer shouted, “Of course!” They created a palette of peach Oklahoma tea roses, deep orange California poppies, warm green and deep inky Italian olives, and butterfly ranunculus. They scanned imagery of the couples’ bees and placed them among the flowers, as creating a beehive was their very first project together as a couple.

In keeping with the floral theme, Sophia and her stylist Kevin Michael Ericson chose diamond floral earrings from Briony Raymond New York that pulled the entire look together. The bride wore those and her engagement ring only. “The dress didn’t need anything else,” she says. “We finished the look with a pair of Monique Lhuillier heels in a perfect shade of pale, peachy pink.”

Matthew Collins did Sophia’s hair, creating a simple, classic bun, and makeup artist Afton Williams handled the bride’s beauty. “A blooming rose became our phrase to describe the look we were going for—warm, romantic, and tender,” Sophia says. Maria Caruso Martin of the Bella Rosa Collection made the bride’s handbag, custom embroidered to match her dress.

Longtime friend Jessica McCormack created the couple’s wedding rings. “She is working with fair-trade gold on her wedding bands now, and it felt very meaningful to not only work with someone we know and have a relationship with but to do so with materials that are gentle to the earth,” Sophia explains. “That felt very aligned with my company, Fashionkind, and our mission at large. To that end, we had another friend and Fashionkind designer, KATKIM, make my diamond band.”

At the start of the ceremony, Sophia and Grant’s parents walked together as the first members of the procession. “We wanted our parents’ love and equitable partnerships to open our ceremony and to walk in their footsteps,” Sophia says.

The parents were followed by the wedding party—a mix of men and women on each side. And then, in another effort to honor the mothers in their lives, they had three of their best friends—Mandana Dayani, Sophia’s partner and cofounder of I am a voter; her best friend Lily Lasuzzo of Poste & Co; and Jessica Lawmaster of Kindred Leaders—walk their daughters down the aisle as the flower girls. The girls wore dresses from Doloris Petunia.

Once everyone had walked, Sophia and Grant descended the stairs on either side of Villa Philbrook’s galleries. “We met in the middle, took one another’s hands, and together we walked into our wedding,” Sophia says. “As we got up to the aisle, we slowed to look at everyone there—our friends and loved ones. It was such a sight to behold. And then up the aisle we went, to meet our emcee, longtime best friend, and prolific author Jedidiah Jenkins.”

The couple asked Jedidiah to speak about community. The couples’ friend, activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, was also called up first to read her piece, Freedom Is a Community Project, written for the John Lewis flag. Next, Sophia and Grant’s relationship coach, Laurie Gerber, officiated the couples’ vows. Laurie spoke of her work with the couple, who completed her multiyear marriage prep course in a matter of months, and how theirs would be a teaching marriage because they personify her creed that love is, in fact, a verb.

“I have truly never felt so much positivity at once, so much clarity,” Sophia says of the ceremony. “As a person who suffers anxiety, it felt incredible to experience a sheer absence of it. I couldn’t stop smiling.”

The couple entered the reception and began their first dance to friend Jack Garratt playing a rendition of Sunday Kind of Love by Etta James, backed by the band. Sophia knew there would come a time during the evening when she’d want to change into something sleeker. “My gown was exquisite but also took up a lot of space, and we had dancing to do!” she says. “So Kevin and I worked with Emilia Wickstead to create the second dress. She has long been one of my favorite designers, and I had just worn her to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

The designer sketched multiple options for the bride, and they settled on a strapless gown in an ivory textured cloqué with a detachable train—which Sophia and Kevin dubbed “the waist cape”—that perfectly hit the floor, creating a waterfall below the hemline of the dress. “We sent her imagery of my Monique gown, and she sourced an incredible floral brocade silk to line the inside of my waist cape, to iterate on the floral theme,” Sophia explains. “And we dyed a pair of satin Jimmy Choo heels to match the ivory shade and stitched two matching brooches from Beladora Jewelry—sewn on by Grant’s best man!—to the corners where the cape attached to the back of the gown. Matthew had taken my hair down for our first dance, and we let it be for the change.”

At the after-party at Leon Russell’s Church Studio, Justin Boreta spun dance music all night. Matching all the disco balls that the couple had installed for the occasion, Sophia changed into a Cristina Ottaviano minidress. Paired with ivory and silver cowboy boots, it was the perfect dress for dancing until 5 a.m. “I swapped into another pair of vintage diamond earrings from Briony Raymond that looked like midcentury starbursts, and Matthew tied my hair half up in a velvet ribbon,” Sophia says. “I felt very country-western glam!”

As for the wedding registry? Bush and Hughes turned that tradition into a moment of giving as well, launching the Bush Hughes Foundation for Progress to raise money and awareness for organizations advancing progress and justice in Tulsa.