This Bride’s Last-Minute Wedding Looks Included Custom Colleen Allen and Secondhand Vintage

Suzee Ihrke is a last-minute planner—so much so that “it’s an ongoing joke in my friend group that I will find my outfit for something 24 hours in advance.” So it came as no great shock that, a month and a half before her Summer Solstice wedding to the co-founder and CEO of tech company Curacity, Nick Slavin, Suzee still had no dress. “Almost every single one of my looks came together three or four weeks before the wedding,” she says.

While the bride admits she tends to wait until the 11th hour, some matters were out of her hands. Suzee, who leads the strategic partnerships and marketing team at David Yurman, had been working with a designer on a custom dress when plans fell through in what she calls “very interesting circumstances.” So she turned to stylist and creative brand consultant Anny Choi, who came highly recommended by friends. On their initial call, Suzee mentioned to Anny that she would be interested in working with New York designer Colleen Allen.

Colleen, it turned out, was the perfect solution. “Usually I wouldn’t even take a call that close to the wedding date,” Anny says. But, “Suzee told me what happened and mentioned Colleen as someone she might be interested in working with, and I knew I had to take her on.” Suzee’s interest in the rising star designer felt like kismet: Anny and Colleen worked together at Vogue in 2017 (Anny as a market editor, Colleen as an intern in the fashion department). “I had never really considered custom bridal before, but when Anny reached out, it just felt right,” Colleen says. “It was a chance to create something deeply personal for someone at such an important moment. Ritual has always been central to my work, and for many women, a wedding dress is the most emotional ritual garment they’ll ever wear.”

When it came time to meet with Colleen, Suzee knew that she wanted something non-traditional. “She had this set of sheer, ruched dresses in her fall 2025 collection that I was obsessed with,” she says. “I knew I wanted something really romantic, light, ethereal, and a little organic.” (Anny also pulled references from John Galliano’s Dior and Alexander McQueen’s spring 2003 shipwreck collection.) “We all had to show up with an open mind, but everything fell into place once Suzee put on the gathered silk chiffon gown from Colleen’s fall 2025 collection,” Anny agrees. “It was the first dress she put on in the studio.”

Colleen began building from there, fashioning both her first-ever custom look and first wedding dress in one fell swoop. “It was an intimate, collaborative process, with every detail considered specifically for her,” Colleen says. “It’s the most personal dress I’ve ever created for someone else.”

“It was just bonkers,” Suzee adds. “She just started pulling pieces of random fabric out of bins and pinning them to my body.”

From there, Colleen festooned the dress with strands of hand-strung beads and French sequins and added dimension with stray pieces of raw beige and seafoam fabric. She also added a godet skirt to help achieve Suzee’s vision of a flowing, romantic look. “She had such a fresh perspective and brought to the table this non-traditional vibe that I was going for,” Suzee says. “And we were both experiencing the entire process for the first time together, which made it so special.”

But a custom Colleen Allen dress wasn’t the only showstopper in her fashion arsenal. Suzee and Nick kicked off their June wedding weekend with a welcome party at La Fontaine Gaillon in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement. The bride, keen to wear emerging designers with a strong point of view, stumbled across the closing look from Conner Ives’s fall 2025 show, which the designer had just presented in London. “Obviously, it wasn’t available,” she says. “Then one day Anny sent me a screenshot of the same dress. She was like, ‘Do you like this? I saw it in his runway show—I think it’d be perfect for you. Let me email him.’”

The dress arrived at Suzee’s door a week and a half before she left for Paris. “I didn’t have any time for alterations. It was so perfect. I didn’t have to touch a single thing about it,” she says. Suzee styled the gauzy bateau-neck gown with a vintage Valentino couture clutch from The RealReal, and a diamond-encrusted cable necklace and matching earrings loaned by David Yurman.

In another down-to-the-wire decision, Suzee pulled a sartorial 180 for the reception in a daring Alaïa two-piece from spring 2025—a nude bandeau top and white draped skirt slung over the shoulder by a gold chain strap. “We knew we wanted to counterbalance the ethereal and romantic wedding dress with something that felt a little bit more edgy and fresh and fun to jump around and dance in,” she says. The last-minute wedding weekend addition came from a scroll on Vogue Runway, courtesy of Anny. The only problem? The look was only available at the Paris boutique. “I literally had that skirt delivered to my hotel room in Paris before the wedding,” Suzee says. “We were just trusting the universe that it would work out.”

For the final look of the night, Suzee found her “something old” in a silver vintage Dolce Gabbana fringed skirt and lace-up corset. “I was dead-set on finding something that was not white for at least one of the looks and something vintage,” she says. So, a month and a half before the wedding, when she saw someone selling the early 2000s Dolce number on Vestiaire Collective, “I think I screamed,” she says. “I immediately ordered it.” She rounded out her look with a pair of silver Rabanne heels and a chainmail bag, plus a silver diamond pavé choker and matching huggies from David Yurman.

Looking back on the mad-dash weekend, everything felt miraculous. “It’s very rare that our visions are fully aligned,” Anny says of working with brides. “I really felt that way in working with Suzee for her wedding.” Suzee adds, “It was so serendipitous.”