A bride spent 14 months designing custom bridesmaid dresses for her 'Bridgerton'-inspired wedding

Jennifer Lee has loved fashion since her mom taught her how to sew when she was just 6 years old.

Lee was a competitive ice skater from 6 to 16 and worked with her mom to create costumes for her programs.

"When I first started ice skating, a lot of the outfits that I wanted didn't really exist. If you wanted something that was really elegant and showed great movement and grace, it was meant for Olympic skaters," Lee recalled.

"My mom taught me how to help her create these costumes to make our programs come alive," she added. "I have the most fond memories of staying up late with my mom, bedazzling crystals on my dress in hopes to really glimmer in competition."

When Lee went to UCLA, she joined the university's fashion club to keep learning new skills and techniques while pursuing a degree in bioengineering.

"I designed four collections in four years for our annual fashion show and, through that, kind of honed my craft," Lee said. "This was before YouTube, so I would take patterns from Joann Fabric and reconstruct them to create different garments. I learned how to pattern through that."

Lee's designs took a backseat as she pursued a career in cosmetics innovation. But after getting engaged, she dusted off her old sewing machine.

Lee met Brian Shea at a club in Barcelona, where his dance moves immediately caught her eye.

"Brian is pretty tall, so he was all limbs on the dance floor, and I found that really endearing," she said with a laugh. "We stayed up chatting all night."

Their instant friendship became a long-distance relationship for three-and-a-half years before Shea left Chicago behind and joined Lee in NYC just before COVID hit.

Lee had rediscovered her love for ice skating during the pandemic, and Shea would sometimes join her before work. He'd do laps in his hockey skates around the rink at Bryant Park while she worked on jumps and spins. So Lee thought nothing of it when he decided to join her on the morning of February 22, 2022.

"It was like 6:30 a.m. and maybe 20 degrees, so nobody was there," Lee said. "I thought we were going to start a little dance routine, and he went down to tie his hockey skate, but in reality, he got down on one knee and proposed. It was perfect."

Lee had already returned to one of her childhood passions. As she began planning her wedding, she knew she wanted to return to fashion.

"With it being so personal and bringing together everyone I love, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to develop my first really cohesive collection for my family and friends — and my first bridal collection," she said.

It took Lee more than a year to make her six bridesmaid dresses.

"I was called the bag lady for probably 14 months leading up to my wedding," she said. "I would show up to work with a wheelie bag filled with patterns and fabric."

Nearly every night after work, Lee would head straight from her office to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she'd sew or make patterns from 6 p.m. to midnight. She approximates that the materials for each dress — all made with small-batch fabric — cost around $500.

"I didn't always get it right, too," she added. "So there were times I'd have to get new fabric and start over and figure it out."

The dresses were inspired by "Bridgerton," which fit perfectly with the venue's garden setting. But Lee didn't want them to be traditional.

Lee incorporated modern side and back cutouts or shoulder-baring silhouettes to make the dresses feel contemporary. She also kept the collection cohesive by sticking to a pastel palette, encouraging her friends to try colors they had never worn before.

"It's trendy now to understand if you're a warm or cool tone, but as a designer, that's something I've always kept in mind," Lee said. "So knowing if my friends were warm or cool, I wanted to push them a little bit and put them in a color palette that was unexpected."

"My bridesmaids were excited to see themselves in colors that are maybe outside their day-to-day wear but still made them look beautiful and radiant," she added. "They knew it was very much a fusion of their personality and my personality and our friendship together."

Since most of Lee's bridesmaids lived in LA or San Francisco, she had to navigate making the dresses without many fittings.

"Every time I flew home to plan the wedding, I would pack my muslin samples and different fabrics so I could shape and make sure the fabrics complemented their different skin tones," Lee said.

Lee also had to learn to make edits on the fly as some of her bridesmaids became pregnant or new moms.

"It meant so much to me to get the fit right and make sure that they felt comfortable," Lee said. "My friends have been there for me through the ups and downs of a long-distance relationship and all the heartbreaks before I met Brian, so it was important to me that they loved the dresses."

The bridesmaids' custom getting-ready outfits were also part of Lee's 26-piece wedding collection.

Lee made customized button-up shirts for her bridesmaids inspired by varsity jackets. Each jacket was decorated with the first letter of their name and had a badge that read, "The Bicoastal Bestie Club — from New York to LA to San Francisco."

The bride also made her own getting-ready outfit and shoes, upcycling a pair of Nike Dunks with pink feathers to match her bridesmaids' ensembles.

Lee's collection included custom ties she designed for her husband, brother, and groomsmen. She also made custom button-ups for her close friends who emceed the couple's traditional Chinese wedding tea ceremony and black-and-white robes for her and Shea to wear during their after-party.

While Lee was designing her collection, she asked the Galia Lahav team to create a custom tea ceremony dress that paid tribute to her Chinese-American roots.

Head designer Sharon Sever had never made a tea ceremony dress, but Lee said he was elated by the idea.

"Sharon is a visionary; it was just so seamless," Lee said. "He sketched up a beautiful drawing of me in a red dress, and I knew at that moment it was going to be the dress that I wore for the tea ceremony."

And Lee knew she wanted to walk down the aisle in a Monique Lhuillier gown.

"I've always dreamed of being in a Monique Lhuillier dress," Lee said. "I just love her beautiful lace designs, and the dress was perfect — it was a fairytale and really fit with the 'Bridgerton'-inspired wedding."

Lee's mom flew out to New York City to watch her try on the dress — a memory that Lee still cherishes.

"I was just overwhelmed with emotions, and it was amazing to see my mom so happy as well," she said. "It was everything and more."

Lee said it was incredible to see her bridesmaids in their dresses as she walked down the aisle on her wedding day.

"I was filled with every type of emotion; it was just amazing to see them all lined up together," Lee said. "It was this moment of, 'I can't believe I'm walking down the aisle right now to my husband,' and it also felt like a very euphoric moment of, 'I can't believe I did all this.'"

"When I told people I was making my bridesmaids' dresses, they looked at me like I was crazy," she added. "So I was like, 'Wow, it really came together.' I felt super accomplished."

One of Lee's favorite memories from the wedding was the Chinese tea ceremony.

"The idea of the tea ceremony is that you're sitting with your elders, they give you a gift to pass on good luck, good fortune, as well as advice, and then you sip tea together," Lee explained.

"I don't think I've ever felt more connected to my heritage and culture than in that moment," she added. "And in a beautiful red dress, which was fantastic."

Lee also wore the red dress during her first dance with Shea, which she said she'll never forget.

"I was nervous I wouldn't be able to dance in the dress, but when the time came, the dress moved with me," Lee said. "It was one of our first moments as husband and wife, and it just felt like I was floating."

Lee danced the night away in a custom sequin Monique Lhuillier dress and pink-and-silver Nikes that she had upcycled to match.

Since she had taken such a long break from fashion, Lee said many of her coworkers and old family friends — including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — were surprised by her designs at the wedding.

"He was like, 'I didn't know you sewed so much.' He was really taken aback," Lee recalled with a laugh. "I had this passion that I also didn't necessarily share with people."

Lee's wedding ended with a late-night pool party and dim sum for all her guests.

After Lee jumped into the pool in her dress, she and Shea put on their after-party robes, decorated with the words "And they lived happily ever after" on the back.

Lee loved designing her wedding collection so much that she launched a fashion brand.

Lee has made time to sew every single week since her wedding and now takes custom orders through her brand, Esque. She describes it as a "haven for fashion-forward tastemakers seeking to stand out from the crowd with wearable, runway-worthy pieces."

And Lee doesn't think she'll ever take a break from fashion design again.

"When you have this passion, it finds a way," she said. "It bubbles up to the surface no matter what you're doing, no matter how old you are. Now that it's been reignited, I can't stop."