Anyone who follows Mandy Lee online, where she goes by the handle @oldloserinbrooklyn, recognizes her as an incisive fashion critic, trend forecaster, and collector. Surely, one imagines, that when it came time to pick a wedding dress, she would have it all figured out. Instead, Mandy was paralyzed by the sheer breadth of options—so much so that she didn’t even have a wedding dress until the eleventh hour.
Mandy and her now-husband Eric got engaged in the summer of 2022, but stalled on planning. Still, she knew that she wanted to get married in 2024—the 10-year anniversary of the first time they met—so the couple rushed to pull a New York City wedding together in four months. “I think what I did was borderline insane,” Mandy tells Vogue. When it came to finding a wedding dress, she knew in her heart of hearts that she wanted to wear something by the Irish designer Simone Rocha, who is known for her dreamy, highly embellished looks. “I collect pretty much only brands that are the creative director as a woman, and she’s my number one.”
Before she found the one, Mandy had purchased two other Simone Rocha dresses, one of which hailed from the designer’s bridal capsule collection for Canadian retailer SSENSE. While she knew she would wear one for the after-party, “it was not what I wanted for the ceremony.” So she headed to Dover Street Market, opening herself up to the possibility of wearing an emerging designer, when she spotted her all-time dream dress: one of the closing gowns from Simone Rocha’s spring 2022 collection, a sheer white button-up design with poufy lace sleeves, a tiered skirt, and flowing ribbons over a crystal-embellished bra. “I was like, What the hell is this doing here?” she says.
The dress, on display long past its original season, was likely a sample—something she was clued into by its off-white color, as opposed to the pure paper white that hit the runway. Lee knew it was unlikely that Dover Street would let her buy it. “They were so sweet, they actually checked for me. I don’t know how they checked, but they were like, ‘We are so sorry, we can’t [sell you the dress].’”
But as luck would have it, Mandy was going to a signing for Rocha’s Rizzoli book in SoHo the very next day, where she and the designer met for the very first time. “I had never met Simone before, which is insane, because even she said, ‘I felt like we’ve met before,’” she says. Lee was also introduced to her publicists. “I offhandedly told them that I went to Dover Street the day before trying to get this dress,” she recalls.
Since the dress was part of Rocha’s personal archive, the PR team offered to ask the designer to lend it to Lee for her wedding. “She did say yes. I was able to pick it up the next week,” Mandy says. The four-piece dress, consisting of a bra, tulle underskirt, sheer ribbon layer, and an overcoat fit perfectly. “It was pretty magical,” she adds.
For the afterparty at the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in Brooklyn, the bride changed into her second Simone Rocha look. She wore a long sheer dress from the fall 2024 season with puffed sleeves and rhinestone details on the collar and under the bust, complete with laces on the bodice. She paired it with green metallic flats by the designer.
Looking back on it all now, Lee is still awestruck by the way the stars aligned. “I’m not very spiritual, but there was something,” she says. “It was meant to be, basically.”
