“It was absolutely love at first sight,” Katherine Mendenhall, the president of ’s swimwear brand, Inamorata, recalls of the moment she reconnected with her now husband Marcos Alvarado on a group trip to Sicily during the summer of 2019. “Between Marcos going to college with my sister and both of us living downtown, we had a lot of mutual friends in the city. Then 12 of us went on vacation to Sicily and stayed at a house in the south.
Marcos and I have been inseparable since that trip. We just knew.” The two were engaged four years later, at home in the summer of 2023.
“After a day taking our favourite hike and then dinner at the same place where we’d had our first date, I came home to our apartment, and it had been filled with flowers, and the ring was on our eldest dog’s collar,” Katherine recalls. “Luckily, our Furbo dog cameras captured the whole proposal, including Marcos smiling to himself secretly setting it up – so sweet.” Katherine is originally from Encinitas, California, but after living in New York for 14 years, she thinks of the city as her home.
Even though Marcos is a born-and-raised New Yorker, friends and family assumed Katherine’s roots meant the couple would have a sunny Southern California wedding. But with the city at the centre of their relationship, getting married on the streets of SoHo felt right. The was held in May 2024 on Howard Street in the heart of the neighbourhood, and afterwards guests followed the newlyweds as they .
