Cassie Levy found her wedding dress before she was even engaged. Don’t imagine her as a raging bridezilla, white-knuckling her way through every step of the wedding planning process, though. Instead, the bride spotted her dress on Instagram.
Levy first saw the dress when her friend, Nick, a buyer for online retailer SSENSE, posted a picture of a Collina Strada dress on his stories. “When I saw it I was like, This is the best thing ever. I don’t even know why I screenshotted it. I just loved it,” she says. “To me, it’s like art. It invoked an emotion in me.”
The dress stayed with Levy—so much so that, when she and her now-husband Mat Cuffaro did get engaged, she instantly thought of it. Still, she tried out a few other options first. “I was going to SSENSE appointments trying on Dolce dresses. I [considered] the Kourtney vibe with the short Dolce dress and the really long dramatic veil,” she says. “I think my mom was a bit sad I wasn’t going to go to Kleinfeld’s with her and do that whole thing.” But it was always the Collina Strada she returned to. “It stuck with me,” she says.
Originally from the spring 2023 collection, the gauzy, just-barely-pink dress is covered in floral appliqués and features an asymmetrical train that juts out from the hip. It’s far from the traditional, bridal white gown, but then Levy is far from the traditional bride. “We did all of the traditional wedding things, but we wanted to make it feel as untraditional as possible,” Levy says of her Montreal restaurant bash, which was followed by a rollicking after-party.
Levy, who prioritized the party over the dress, knew that her outfit of choice had to fit into her celebration plans—not vice versa. “The vibe was really a dinner party, followed by a crazy after-party. We did it at a restaurant, and when it came to the dress, it had to match the vibe,” she says. “It couldn’t be this gown. That would’ve clashed.”
Still, even though the couple was looking to have a bash, Levy still needed to make her dress “wedding-appropriate.” “The Collina team was super accommodating, letting me come to the New York showroom and helping me adjust the dress and fit it perfectly for the day,” she says. “They added an extra layer over the bum and boob and they shortened the front to make it a bit more sexy. I believe it was the head pattern-maker who was using scissors to cut the dress directly on me.”
The Collina Strada team also helped Levy add some more bridal touches. “They designed a custom garter and veil for me,” she notes. (The garter took center stage at the after party, where Levy wore a white shirtdress and sparkly, knee-high boots.)
Now, with the wedding in the rearview mirror, Levy looks back at the day with fondness—thanks in large part to her decision to wear an untraditional dress: “When I got that dress on [my friends] were like, Yeah, this is it. It’s perfectly you.”
