Two weeks ago, the most talked-about couple on the planet got married at Madison Square Garden, and the man reportedly behind that evening sits at number nine on this list. It was a good month to be reminded of something the industry already knows: at the very top of this profession, a wedding planner is trusted with more than flowers and seating charts. They are handed the most photographed, most scrutinized, most emotionally loaded day in a family's life and expected to make it look effortless.
These are the 25 planners who carry that trust better than anyone else working today. Some of them are household names with television shows and bestselling books. Some have never given an interview in their lives. They work out of Beverly Hills and Charleston, London and Singapore, and the thing they share is a client list that includes the most demanding couples in the world, people who could hire anyone, and hired them.
Here they are.
The Icons
1. Mindy Weiss
Start with the name that comes up first in every conversation about celebrity weddings. Mindy Weiss has run her Beverly Hills firm for more than three decades, and her client list reads like a red carpet: Justin and Hailey Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, and a long run of Kardashian-Jenner family weddings among them. What keeps her at the top is not the famous names, though. Couples describe the same thing over and over: she remembers the personal details and builds the wedding around the people rather than the spectacle. Her book, The Wedding Book, has been the industry's reference manual for years, and she remains the most recognizable wedding planner alive.
2. Colin Cowie
Colin Cowie has spent more than thirty years defining what a modern celebrity wedding looks like. Oprah Winfrey calls him her favorite planner, which is the kind of endorsement that ends arguments, and his approach became the template a generation of planners studied: every sense considered, every moment produced, nothing left to chance from the scent of the room to the temperature of the towels. He works globally out of New York, has written extensively about the craft, including Extraordinary Weddings, and his events still set the standard the rest of the industry measures itself against.
3. Preston Bailey
No one on earth does what Preston Bailey does with flowers. Over a thirty-year career, the New York designer has become famous for transformations that stop being decor and become architecture: ceilings of blooms, life-size floral sculptures, rooms rebuilt entirely in petals. Royalty, CEOs, and stars have hired him for exactly that, and his floral work at the 2024 Ambani wedding in India, including a menagerie of sculpted animals, was seen around the world. Several bestselling books have carried his ideas into the mainstream, but seeing his work in a photograph and standing inside it remain two different experiences.
4. Marcy Blum
Marcy Blum has been a New York institution for 35 years, and she got there by being unlike anyone else in the room. Trained in kitchens before she ever planned a party, she brings a chef's standards to food and a New Yorker's wit to everything else. Billy Joel trusted her with his wedding. So did LeBron and Savannah James, whose 2013 celebration famously required guests to check their phones at the door, a detail that says everything about the privacy her clients buy along with the planning. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar have named her among the best in the world for years, and they are right.
5. Sharon Sacks
When the Kardashian family needed weddings produced at the scale of television events, they called Sharon Sacks, more than once. Her Calabasas firm, Sacks Productions, handles celebrity weddings the way studios handle premieres: enormous guest lists, choreographed reveals, and total control of the moving parts. Her client history runs through entertainment's biggest names and includes events for two American presidents, and she has spent years as the planner the cameras find when entertainment news covers a wedding. Few people alive have produced more weddings at this scale, and it shows in how calm her events feel despite their size.
6. Bryan Rafanelli
Bryan Rafanelli planned Chelsea Clinton's wedding, which means he has produced an event where the guest list included presidents and the security briefing mattered as much as the menu. His Boston and New York firm has staged more than 2,000 events across 50 cities, including work for the Obama White House, and that political-grade discipline shapes everything he touches. The design is refined, but the logistics are the real signature: nothing at a Rafanelli wedding is left to luck. For couples whose weddings are matters of public record, he has become the obvious call.
7. Yifat Oren
You will not find Yifat Oren promoting herself, which is precisely the point. The Los Angeles planner is Hollywood's quiet choice, the one A-list couples hire when they want a beautiful wedding and no leaks. Natalie Portman's Big Sur wedding and Reese Witherspoon's ranch celebration were hers, both executed with the understated, editorial style she is known for: nothing gilded, everything considered. In an industry that runs on publicity, Oren built one of its most coveted client lists by offering the opposite.
8. Lynn Easton
Lynn Easton takes on roughly ten weddings a year, and turning her down room is part of what makes Easton Events the name in luxury destination weddings. Working from Charleston and Charlottesville, she produces multi-day celebrations for a clientele that runs toward the Forbes list and the awards circuit, few of whom you will ever see credited, which is how they like it. She also co-owns celebrated hotels, including Zero George in Charleston, so her understanding of hospitality goes down to the thread count. Every major best-planner list includes her. Hers is the version of luxury that whispers.
The Masters
9. Mark Seed
The most interesting planner in the world right now has no Instagram, no website to speak of, and has never given an interview. Mark Seed reportedly planned the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce wedding at Madison Square Garden this July, the most anticipated wedding in a generation, and true to form, he has said nothing. His verified client list was already remarkable: Jennifer Lawrence and Cooke Maroney in Newport, Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff in New Jersey, Billie Lourd in Cabo San Lucas. He is known for elaborate custom builds, entire greenhouses and gardens constructed for a single evening, and one of his rare on-record clients called him, simply, a genius in Vogue. In an era when everyone performs their work online, Seed lets the weddings speak.
10. Tara Guerard
Tara Guerard built her reputation on Southern refinement executed to an exacting standard, and it carried her from Charleston to New York and onto Vogue and Harper's Bazaar's lists of the world's best. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds' wedding is among her reported credits. She has written two books on entertaining, and she owns Lettered Olive, the letterpress studio that produces the paper for her events, which tells you how far her standards reach: when she could not buy stationery good enough, she started making it.
11. Lisa Vorce
John Legend and Chrissy Teigen's wedding on Lake Como remains one of the most photographed destination weddings ever staged, and Lisa Vorce produced it. The Los Angeles planner specializes in exactly that kind of event: a far-flung location, a complicated production, and a result that looks serene in every frame. Kate Upton and Olivia Culpo are among the other names on her reported client list, and Vogue, Martha Stewart, and the industry press have all ranked her among the best working. When the wedding is on another continent, experience like hers is the difference between romance and chaos.
12. Jung Lee
Jung Lee's weddings look the way a great building looks: precise, intentional, nothing accidental. The co-founder of Fete in New York has been named among the best planners in the world by Vogue and Harper's Bazaar repeatedly, and her design work has reached as far as the White House, where she contributed to a State Dinner. She also founded the luxury registry Slowdance, extending her taste into what couples keep after the wedding. Her standard is famous in the industry: if a detail can be done better, it will be.
13. Sarah Haywood
Vogue named Sarah Haywood the number one international wedding planner, and twenty years at the top of the British and global luxury market back it up. From London, she plans weddings for a clientele that spans continents, and 2026 marks her firm's twentieth anniversary. She appears on the Spear's Index of advisers to the wealthy, which places her in the company of private bankers and estate lawyers, and that is the right company: at her level, a wedding planner is a trusted adviser who happens to produce celebrations.
14. Michelle Rago
Michelle Rago has spent more than three decades becoming the authority on destination weddings, and she keeps her standard high a simple way: one wedding per weekend, nothing overlapping. Her New York firm, Michelle Rago Destinations, has produced celebrations around the world, with Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz's wedding among her reported credits. She wrote Signature Weddings, and her name has become shorthand in the industry for a specific promise: however far from home the wedding is, it will run as if she planned it on her own street.
15. Laurie Arons
San Francisco's Laurie Arons has planned ultra-private, design-forward weddings since 1994, and her influence now runs twice as deep: through her own events, and through the planners she trains. Her masterclass is the most sought-after education in the field, the rare program working planners describe as career-changing. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Brides, and Martha Stewart have all honored her work. Thirty years in, she is both one of the best planners alive and the person teaching the next generation how it is done.
16. Jennifer Zabinski
Jennifer Zabinski produced Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian's New Orleans wedding, a celebration that managed to be enormous, star-filled, and genuinely personal at once, and she planned Meghan Markle's New York baby shower, which drew the world's cameras to a private lunch. Trained at Cornell's hotel school, the New York planner brings hospitality discipline to celebrity-scale events, and Vogue named her among the best in 2025. Her weddings tend to share a quality the industry finds hard to fake: they feel like the couple, not the planner.
17. Lindsay Landman
Since 2001, Lindsay Landman has run one of New York's most complete operations: planning, design, and production under one roof, one accountable team from first meeting to last dance. Harper's Bazaar and Brides have both named her among the best in the world. Her clients tend to be people who run large organizations themselves and recognize the value of a planner who operates the same way, with clear systems and no finger-pointing between vendors. It is a less romantic pitch than some on this list, and it produces some of the most flawless weddings in the country.
18. Calder Clark
Calder Clark plans a deliberately limited number of weddings each year from Charleston and Raleigh, and each one is built to engage every sense: the sound of the band arriving at the right moment, the smell of the low country in the tent, food worth remembering. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Martha Stewart, and Southern Living have all named her among the best, and she has become the standard-bearer for a distinctly Southern kind of luxury, gracious and unhurried on the surface, rigorous underneath.
The Vanguard
19. David Tutera
David Tutera is the most famous wedding planner on television, full stop. My Fair Wedding made his name a household word, seven books extended it, and Star Jones' wedding was among the celebrity celebrations that built his reputation before the cameras arrived. Purists sometimes discount TV fame; they shouldn't. Tutera has brought more people inside the craft of wedding planning than anyone alive, and an entire generation of working planners can trace their first spark to watching him transform a wedding in an hour of television.
20. Sasha Souza
Sasha Souza founded her firm in 1995, and in the three decades since, it has become one of the most awarded planning and design operations in Northern California. Working across Napa, Sonoma, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, she built her name on inventive design and then did what the best in any field eventually do: she wrote it down, in two Signature Sasha books, and began mentoring the planners coming up behind her. Ask working planners on the West Coast who they learned from, and her name comes up constantly.
21. Lelian Chew
Harper's Bazaar named Lelian Chew a top wedding planner in the world, and the BBC called her the Million-Dollar Wedding Planner, which understates some of her budgets. From Singapore and Hong Kong, her firm The Atelier and Co produces Asia's most extraordinary weddings, with a floral atelier in-house so the design never leaves her control. She is the definitive name in the fastest-growing luxury wedding market on earth, and any global list without her is not a global list.
22. Diann Valentine
Diann Valentine planned weddings for Usher and Toni Braxton, hosted wedding television of her own, and along the way changed the actual look of American weddings: the Tiffany-blue wedding craze traces back to her. One of the most recognizable Black planners in the industry's history, she has been a generation's proof of what the top of this profession can look like, and her influence shows up today in ballrooms she has never set foot in.
23. Bruce Russell
From offices in London and San Francisco, Bruce Russell plans weddings on both sides of the Atlantic with a polish that has earned him the ELLE International Bridal Awards' Best Wedding Planner and a place on Harper's Bazaar's list of top planners. His clients get a rare combination: British formality where it counts, American warmth where it matters, and a planner equally at home in a Mayfair ballroom or a Napa vineyard.
24. Jove Meyer
Jove Meyer's Brooklyn weddings look like nobody else's, colorful and personal and allergic to tradition for tradition's sake, and that is exactly why Harper's Bazaar and Brides rank him among the best. He is also one of the industry's most important advocates: a leading voice for LGBTQ+ couples who co-taught the first LGBTQ+ wedding planning seminar for The Knot, pushing an entire industry to plan for every couple. Plenty of planners follow taste. Meyer has spent a career expanding whose weddings get to define it.
25. Annie Lee
Annie Lee planned A-list weddings at Daughter of Design, wrote Learn to Speak Wedding to decode the industry for couples, and then founded Plannie, a platform putting planning tools in everyone's hands. Refinery29 dubbed her The Wedding Doctor, and as one of the industry's most prominent AAPI voices, she has spent her career opening doors: for couples who could not afford full planning, and for planners who did not see themselves in the industry's old guard. The craft's future looks more like her career than its past does.
Every planner on this list started with a first wedding, a folding table, and a couple who took a chance on them.
Max Miller is the founder of EventPlanning.com and an established planner with years of corporate planning experience.