Viewers of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show on Sunday were expecting an extravagant performance from the Puerto Rican star, but they probably weren’t expecting to see a real-life wedding.
Thomas Wolter and Eleisa Aparico invited Bad Bunny to their wedding on a lark late last year, and he proposed they get married live on-stage during the halftime show, with Bad Bunny serving as a witness. The couple was ecstatic, and so was Hayley Paige, the designer whose dress Aparico wore in front of around 140 million people.
Paige is the founder and designer behind her eponymous bridal brand, which she recently regained control of after a protracted legal battle with its former parent company, JLM Couture. Paige told Glossy that the appearance of a dress from her upcoming collection came together quickly.
“My sister [Megan Gutman] is a producer, and she has worked on Super Bowl commercials, and she has a friend who is a stylist [Joleen Garnett] who reached out to me a few weeks ago saying they needed a few wedding dresses,” Paige said. “They couldn’t say what it was for, so I sent over a few different dresses in different sizes.”
She was eventually told that it could be used in the halftime show, though she didn’t get her hopes up.
“Stylists pull stuff all the time and it doesn’t end up getting picked, so I was ready for that to be the end of it,” she said.
But Aparico did end up picking one of Paige’s dresses, a dress called “Becoming Jane” from the brand’s second collection since Paige regained control of the business. It’s an all-over lace dress with some stretch lining — ideal for dancing — and was paired with a matching veil.
It’s hard to quantify the impact of a halftime show fashion moment, but last year’s performance by Kendrick Lamar showed the potential. Google searches for “flared jeans” increased by 5,000% after Lamar wore a pair during the show. And Launchmetrics calculated around $2 million worth of media impact for Celine, the brand that made the jeans. In less than 24 hours after the show, Hayley Paige’s marketing team reported over 1.5 million views of content related to the halftime dress and over 40,000 likes.
The brand’s presence in the show came with the added benefit of costing Paige nothing beyond the price of the dress itself. (It was technically a loan, but Paige allowed Aparico to keep the dress.) A 30-second Super Bowl ad was quoted this year at $8 million. The Hayley Paige dress was on-screen during the NBC broadcast for roughly that amount of time, free of charge.
For Paige, the opportunity to have one of her dresses in front of tens of millions of people was a great way to restart her bridal design career. In the 2010s, Paige became a household name with over a million followers on Instagram and a presence on the reality show “Say Yes to the Dress.” But in a legal dispute with parent JLM, the company asserted control over Paige’s personal Instagram account in 2020.
For four years, Paige was barred from using her own name in any professional context and from working in bridal fashion in any way. That led her to create a new Instagram handle, @allthatglittersonthegram, and start a non-bridal footwear brand under a different name, She Is Cheval. Hayley Paige was generating over $200 million in annual revenue before the lawsuit. Only in late 2024 did she regain control of her accounts and her brand name, relaunching the brand around six months ago and making her return to the bridal market.
“You couldn’t ask for a better moment or visibility and cultural relevance,” Paige said. “It’s wild that we re-debuted six months ago, and now we’re at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.”
Paige has already been capitalizing on the moment. On Monday, the day after the game, she posted videos to her socials of herself talking about the dress, including how the moment came together and how customers could style the dress if they purchased the same one. She has also been reposting posts about the dress by stylists, wedding planners and other wedding professionals. Her team is planning more related social content in the coming days.
While it’s too early to say what kind of sales bump Hayley Paige may see from the moment, Paige said she can feel the organic buzz. The wedding planning platform The Knot posted about the event on its Instagram, and Paige’s first post about the dress’s appearance amassed 16,000 views in the first few hours it was live.
That buzz has also come from Hayley Paige’s retail partners. Bridal retailers like Texas-based Coreena’s Bridal have been posting that they carry the dress seen in the show. The brand is sold in over 150 retailers nationwide.
Paige is planning to debut her second collection at Bridal Fashion Week in New York in April, plus a third collection in October, and she continues to run her footwear brand. She’s also planning her own wedding for later this year.
“I’m essentially designing myself a collection so I can figure out what dress I want to wear at my own wedding,” Paige said. “It will be a fun way to, pun intended, marry the brand to my personal life.”
