How I Put My Own Twist on Modest Bridalwear

I knew I’d never get married in a dress. I always wanted a skirt suit. It’s what my mother wore to her tiny wedding in Boston back in 1978, and so that’s what I wanted to wear, too.

After getting engaged two years ago, I quickly decided my own wedding skirt suit would be designed by Svitlana Bevza of the Kyiv-based label Bevza, who I first discovered on a trip to Ukraine Fashion Week in 2015, and who has since become a close friend. During our initial discussions over WhatsApp, I told Bevza I wanted to evoke the crisp, bold-shouldered effect of my mother’s look along with Michelle Pfieffer’s optic white skirt suit in Scarface, but… we’d have to make the skirt much longer. I was going to have an Orthodox Jewish wedding and be married by the beloved Rabbi Rodkin of Brighton, Massachusetts, for whom I used to work during the summers in college.

While no one explicitly told me I had to dress modestly for the wedding ceremony, my brain was trained to think that I should. When I spent summers working for Rodkin at his camp and school, I covered my arms and knees. This was my first office job, and it was refreshing to learn about dress codes in the workplace–and later learn the deeper meaning behind modesty in Judaism. Whenever I enter a religious home or space, I still cover myself. The wedding ceremony, full of centuries-old traditions, would be no different, and I planned to incorporate my dalliances with full coverage into my look.

Photo: Lucia Bell-Epstein

No problem. Bevza has inherent elegance and modesty in her designs. She would be the perfect woman to create the look. On a breezy May night, Bevza, who, at the time, was in town to attend the Met Gala, met me for dinner at Casino. She took my measurements in the middle of a crowded dining room—bust included!—and scribbled the numbers on a scrap of paper. Over the next few months, she worked with her team in Kyiv to create the skirt suit.

Bevza and her team were operating under precarious conditions. (Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sirens go off and bombs drop in the country’s capital—yet, her team continues to work.) Honestly, I doubted that the dress would get to the United States: mail, along with travel, is tricky in Ukraine to say the least. Eventually, the dress did arrive about two weeks before the wedding by Ukrainian postage. I put it on, and it fit perfectly. Bevza innately understands how to cinch the waist and, indeed, let the bust bloom.

My bursting bosom made me realize we had another component to tackle: the modesty factor. I couldn’t be under the chuppah while, well, busting out. So I went to visit Ornela Flamuri uptown to give the piece a touch of holiness. For the uninitiated, Ornela is a mononym: The Albania native is the top tailor in New York City whose whole family has a My Cousin Vinny-style lineage when it comes to the art of adjusting clothing. (Her sister, mother, grandmother, and so on.) Ornela suggested there should be a panel that would cover the collarbone. My friend and former coworker, Anny Choi—now a top bridal stylist—and I went to Mood Fabrics to find a fabric shade that matched the dress. The idea worked: Ornela placed tiny snaps on each side of the V-neck opening as well as the fabric and then snapped the panel into the dress, creating a delightful sheath of godliness.

By the end of the dress alterations, I remembered the final major sartorial step of a traditional Jewish marriage: the veil. It’s the most storied piece of Old Testament history! Rebecca wore a veil when she married Isaac, and of course, Jacob married Leah thinking she was Rachel— alas, he couldn’t tell because there was a girthy swathe of fabric covering her face.

But I digress. The veil could have been a sheet. It could have been a piece of paper towel. Whatever it was, I needed a face covering—and I immediately thought of Batsheva Hay. In her own wedding portrait, Hay wears a thick cloth veil, which she told me was her grandmother’s tablecloth. But there were no bubbe’s scraps for me. I returned to Mood Fabrics with Choi, and she helped me find material for Hay to create the perfect veil. The dress was sleek satin, so why not go the full, exaggerated, gem-slathered mile? I bought crystal embroidered fabric that I took to Hay’s midtown office. There, she and a team member created the piece by cutting it and lining it with mesh so it wouldn’t slip from my head.

After the ceremony, I removed the panel and put on my jewelry: an ’80s-era pearl necklace, ring, and earring set from my mother and a natural pearl necklace from my mother-in-law. (According to Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, the bride does not wear jewelry during the ceremony.) While removing a panel felt like a minor post-nuptial tweak to the look, the skirt suit without the modest piece of fabric felt completely different—saucy, I’d say. No outfit change necessary. In fact, the only item that stayed on throughout? Cream heels by the mensch of all footwear designers, Stuart Weitzman.