Rachel Lindsay Wore a Convertible Wedding Dress for Two Looks in One

Rachel Lindsay never thought she would get her fairy-tale ending. So now that it’s here, she’s going all out.

“I always wanted to get married in a courthouse,” Lindsay exclusively tells Brides during a Bridal Fashion Week event. “I wanted it to be quick. I thought that once I found the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with—we don’t need the big hoopla. That’s kind of how I looked at it. We don’t need all of that, we just need each other.”

But now that she has a fiancé, Bryan Abasolo—they met and were engaged on season 13 of the Bachelorette—and they are going through the wedding planning process, she realizes that her downplaying the wedding was rooted in her thinking the opportunity to have one would never come.

“It’s really something, that if I think about, I didn’t think would happen for me,” Lindsay admits. “I didn’t think I would find my guy, and then have this opportunity to marry the man of my dreams in front of the people who I love the most. So I think I really downplayed a wedding and being a bride, and now that it’s actually happening [with] moments like this, I'm realizing how excited I am.”

One thing that has this bride-to-be giddy is her wedding dress (relatable). She is going with a custom design by Randi Rahm that is completely different than what she thought she wanted. “I thought I wanted a split in my wedding dress, but Randi said something to me: ‘You don’t want a dress that you could wear on a red carpet or just to an event,’ and I really took that to heart,” Lindsay says. “Those words really resonated with me. So for the wedding I wanted to do something that I felt encompassed who I am, but it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen me in before either.”

She also revealed some details of her dress, which was slightly inspired by Kaley Cuoco's wedding dress: “There is the beading element to it, there is a sheer element to it, but it doesn’t look anything like Kaley’s.” She also adds that the dress will be "timeless," have a princessy feel—an element her fiancé specifically requested—and will be somewhat convertible.

“When you wear a Randi Rahm dress, there are always multiple looks. That’s what’s so great about her dresses,” Lindsay says. “It’s like one thing I can do and I have a completely different outfit or I can do something else and there’s another outfit, so that will definitely be apart of my dress. I will walk down [the aisle] one way, and later on you will see me in a completely different way. And it’s all the same dress.”

The couple is planning to tie the knot in August in a tropical location near where the groom's family is from in Colombia, so the climate was definitely taken into consideration when designing the dress.

Creating the dress also came easy for both bride and designer due to Lindsay and Rahm's long-standing relationship. Lindsay met and got proposed to her future husband in a Rahm original.

“This is the beauty of it. I don’t have to say anything to Randi, she just gets me. I didn’t come to her with a picture. I didn’t say I want to look like this specific bride. I was just myself,” Lindsay says of the design process. “So we had talked about it. She knew the idea of what I wanted. I wanted something that could breathe and then we just picked out certain dresses.”

She continued,“Everyone [said] ‘this is the One’ but when it really was the One I just became the dress. I find myself still going back to look at it and I’m like, ‘yeah that’s the One.’ ”

And for brides going through the wedding dress shopping or designing process now, Rahm says the most important part is finding something that helps you exude confidence. When brides come to her with their image inspo, Rahm explains they are rarely in love with the actual dress. “When somebody shows [me] a picture in a magazine I go ‘Oh it’s beautiful, what are you seeing,’” Rahm says. “What they are really seeing is a feeling not an image. They are not seeing the dress.”

Instead, she asks them what is the most comfortable piece they own—knowing what the client feels most beautiful in is all the designer needs to know to create the perfect dress for them.

As for Lindsay, her perfect dress helps fulfill her fairy tale—the one she thought she would never get. “I think I was just like, 'Oh, I don’t want all the attention.' But it’s not about the attention. It’s about celebrating love and family, and I’m just so excited to be surrounded by the people we love the most and to celebrate love and do it in a glamorous way."