I Didn't Believe In The "Perfect" Wedding Dress, Then I Saw Dolly Meckler's
A loving family, a resourceful tailor and the power of determination.
The dress! It’s really about that dress, or “the main character” as the New York Times called it.
As it should be. But it’s also, I came to find, the story of Dolly Meckler. I first met Dolly via our mutual friend Michael Hoffman at a Shabbat dinner hosted by Lisle Richards and Mathew Shurka circa 2022. I knew immediately; knew that we’d be friends, that that was how it was meant to be and knew that Dolly carried the light. We both got married within weeks of one another (me in April, she in May). She was at my wedding. I would have been at hers had it not been for my husband’s best friend’s wedding.
Like me, Dolly never fantasized about her wedding day the way some do. “In a way,” she says, “I always felt proud of the lack of fantasy.” Dolly’s mother, Jackie Shapiro, is a fashion designer and pattern designer. Her maternal grandmother, Eva (“we called her Abu, short for Abuela”), was a model and fashion designer whose family was in the shmata business. This is a critical detail in understanding the creativity and resourcefulness on hand and engrained in executing the vision for Dolly on her wedding day. It also gives you a sense of the Meckler women. “Being powerful, confident and a go-getter was the default, not the aspiration, if that makes sense,” Dolly tells me. I’m nodding. It makes sense. Being a prototypical bride — this very “female” thing — felt performative in a way that she says never resonated with her. Dolly never wanted to just feel pretty walking down the aisle. It felt obvious and didn’t excite her. If this is a show, she reasoned, let’s really make it one.
“Let’s give people something to look at, something to feel, something to talk about. I’m just that way. That’s what energizes me, and makes me feel beautiful.”
So the dress…? Oh, the dress. “There’s no way I can talk about my dress without mentioning my mom’s wedding dress,” Dolly explains. Her mother wore a red Norma Kamali coat dress during her 1989 nuptials, setting a high bar.
“Everyone was shocked when she walked down the aisle at the New York Academy of Art. A modern woman! I’ve heard about it my entire life, from family and my parents’ friends, about how powerful and memorable it was. Having that context certainly influenced my decision about what I wanted out of a wedding dress.”
Dolly and her mom agreed: The dress was the most important detail of the day. To that end, they enforced three requirements: 1. Wow factor (“I literally told my friends that I hope they gasp, and people did in fact gasp”), 2. Memorability and 3. Say something… without having to say anything.
Dolly had no expectations going into dress shopping, open to what the universe would place in her gaze. February 5, 2022 — T-minus 826 days until the wedding — Dolly’s parents first spotted the dress (henceforth referred to as The Dress) at the Pucci store at Woodbury Commons, a premium outlet center in the Hudson Valley.
“We found your wedding dress,” they called to tell her. I should mention that at that point, Dolly and her then-boyfriend, now-husband Jordan were not yet planning, not yet engaged and were not even thinking about a wedding.
A year later, still thinking about the dress, Dolly and her mom were flipping through the pages of Vogue (I can’t accept “scrolling” into fashion consumption vernacular, I’m sorry) when they discovered the dress once again, this time learning that it was a collaboration between Pucci and Japanese designer Tomo Koizumi. Over the course of the next four months, Dolly and Jordan began planning their wedding.
“We decided on a venue first, chose the date of our engagement together, designed the ring together. Jordan even sent me a calendar invitation for the date we had agreed upon to get engaged: July 15, 2023.”
A month ahead of their engagement, Dolly, ever the ultra-modern girl, DM’s Koizumi on Instagram asking where she can procure one of his wedding gowns in the US. He doesn't see her DM, so no response comes.
Then Lena Dunham intervenes. Dunham, a client of Meckler’s, DM’s Koizumi. This time he responds, which finally gives Meckler access to the designer. Hope! He lets her know that the dress in question is no longer available. Boo. He lets her know that making a custom gown is an option! Yay! But it’s far out of her price range. “It was dozens of thousands of dollars… and I’m no debutante!” Dolly declares.
On July 12, just days before her engagement, Dolly and her mother visited Kleinfeld Bridal, the famed wedding dress shop, in the hope of securing a dress.
“As I was being bungee-corded into dresses because everything was so tiny and didn't fit, I looked at my mom and said, ‘Let's just try calling Woodbury Commons. Maybe they will know where to find a Koizumi x Pucci gown.’"
Jackie called, the manager picked up and told her: “You won't believe this, but I messed up and never sent it back. I have the gown in a box in the back." They immediately packed up their stuff and left Kleinfeld.
“Do you believe in fate?” I ask Meckler. “Oh, definitely,” she replies. “I think when my parents saw the dress in 2022, it was clear that it had my name on it. They knew it. And when they sent the photo of it to me, I knew it too. That was my dress. None of us had ever seen anything like it before. When we called the store over a year later in 2023 and they still had it, it was shocking, but at the same time, it also felt like: ‘Of course they do, because that’s my dress!’”
Two days later, the Meckler women piled onto a bus from Port Authority to Woodbury Commons. Upon arrival, the manager pulled out all the pieces from the collection that they had left: the top, the skirt and a cape. Dolly tried on the top and skirt, but they didn’t fit.
“We didn’t care,” Dolly recounts. “We knew that we could find a skilled seamstress who could help us rework the dress to get it to fit.” They purchased all three pieces, and used the store’s dolly to wheel the both gigantic and heavy dress. Dolly’s dad drove his car to meet them and, together, they stuffed the dress into the car.
"We didn't care." I love this. “It's one of the many things I love about you,” I tell Dolly. “You don't see an obstacle as something to stop you, but rather, something to work through. A challenge!” Her “we didn’t care” reminded me of something Diane von Furstenberg says in her new documentary, something she learned from her mother, a Holocaust survivor: Fear is not an option. It’s not a choice, but rather a rejection. You control your fate. “It’s similar to the question before, about how finding this dress was kismet,” Dolly explains. “I knew that the only option at this point was that it would work itself out, because I believe that’s just how things happen when you want something badly enough.”
Dress: Secured. Fit: Figuring it out. They even, for a time, toy around with the idea of reimagining the dress and making a jumpsuit or bolero jacket out of it. By August, they begin meeting with seamstresses in the hope of finding someone that can take on the job. It’s a challenging fabric and construction, so they need to find someone with both skills and a vision. Eventually, a friend of a friend passes along the name of a very talented tailor who works on couture and custom pieces: Tati Kova. They once again smoosh the dress into garbage bags and take an Uber to the Garment District in the hope of finding another miracle. Kova is shocked by the dress, but decides to take it on because it seems like a "fun challenge" for her.
“The most expensive part of the process was the tailoring,” Dolly admits. “And that’s because we used a very experienced person who’s very creative and talented in couture work. I respect that craft and I wanted to pay to do it right. To be able to see the vision and think through how to get there and to execute it… that's a highly skilled person worth paying for!” Here’s a critical detail worth plucking, in my humble opinion, which is applicable for many occasions as grand as a wedding or as simple as day-to-day life. As RuPaul once said:
“Be yourself. Know your proportions. And have a good tailor.”
Some critical decisions are made: They remove all the Pucci-print lining (and later re-add it) to reconstruct the dress, they open up the neck to create more space around Dolly’s face, they add the cape to the train and, most critically, they come up with what Dolly calls the “genius idea to use mesh as side panels on the top so that my arms lay flat against my side body.” Dolly goes in for a fitting in January of this year. The dress fits! More importantly: She loves it.
On May 11, 2024, Dolly walks down the aisle to audible gasps and "oohs" and "ahhs," which continue throughout the ceremony. When she took a moment to flash the lining, guests flooded the aisles to takes photos and videos.
She effectively gave guests something to look at, something to feel, something to talk about.
I DM’d Tomo Koizumi (who I first write about in a now-deleted 2019 profile for Garage Magazine) to get his thoughts. “I was happy to receive the message from Lena about my dress for Dolly because I don't do custom for someone I don't know normally. I was so happy that she found my collab piece with Pucci and was looking amazing in her!”
So, yes this is the story of an amazing wedding dress. It’s also the story of the bond between a mother and a daughter. As Dolly puts it:
“I think that’s one of my favorite parts of the dress — that I got to do this with my mom. I couldn’t have done it without her. When I look at the dress, I don’t only see the dress. I see the entire process. I see the text my parents sent me two years ago when they first spotted it; I see the bus ride my mom and I took from Port Authority to Woodbury Commons; I see my dad coming to pick us up at Woodbury with his car to take it home; I see all the DMs my mom and I sent back and forth with different ideas about the wedding; I see all the appointments my mom and I went to at the atelier; every laugh, gasp, and even argument in between. I’m so lucky to have parents that know me so well and who embrace me for who I am. My parents knew that dress was mine before I did. That’s a gift! To be known is to be loved.”