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. No problem.
Bevza has inheren.