“I feel like I have to take you down a road to get there,” Rachel Lindsay told Glamour back in April, during Bridal Fashion Week, about the journey (get it?) to walking down the aisle in a custom Randi Rahm wedding dress.

The former Bachelorette married Bryan Abasolo in Mexico last weekend wearing the franchise-favorite designer. (Lindsay actually got engaged in a Randi Rahm gown.) And like most Bachelor stories go, even the process of picking what to wear on her wedding day was full of surprises.

“I thought I wanted pants—there’s a part of me that still loves that, but in talking with Randi, it was like, ‘You can wear pants any day of the week. This is your dress. It’s something special,” Lindsay said. “I wanted to make it unique, since this is a one-time thing, hopefully. I’m getting married in a warm location, so I knew I wanted something that could breathe.”

“I didn’t look at a certain bride and say I wanted to dress like her, which is kind of my personality—I’m never like, ‘I want to be like that person,'” she said. “I go with what I feel.”

She and Rahm talked through potential designs, but it wasn’t until she went into the studio to try on samples that it clicked for her. “I have to admit to the cliché: You know when you put on the dress,” Lindsay said. “When I put on the dress, I melted into it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Her mom, future mother-in-law, and older sister were in the room the first time she tried it on—and “when I walked out in it, they said, ‘That dress is you.'” And though they had spent months meeting up and discussing ideas, “the dress I chose—nothing like the sketches. It really was that I put it on, and it spoke to me.”

Lindsay’s actual wedding dress—which was photographed for People—had a short-sleeved embroidered top with a tulle ballgown skirt.

One of Rahm’s signatures is having a convertible element, where a piece of the garment can be removed and it transforms the whole aesthetic. And obviously, that made it into Lindsay’s wedding dress. “In Rachel and Randi Rahm fashion: I will walk down the aisle in one thing, but I won’t end the night in that same look,” she said. Indeed: A video posted by People TV shows that, when it came time to hit the dance floor, Lindsay ditched the skirt for a pair of polished high-waisted shorts.

Lindsay’s wedding dress is “classic, chic. It represents me in so many ways. It’s not something you’ve seen [from Randi Rahm],” the bride said. “It definitely has the princess element to it, but at the same time is a little edgy. My mom said, ‘It’s very Jackie O.'”

The two have now been collaborators for years, and have worked together to outfit some of Lindsay’s most important days, from her engagement to her wedding. “Sometimes I feel she knows me better than I know myself,” Lindsay said. Over time, Rahm has challenged her point-of-view on what she likes and what she’s open to.

Even ahead of her turn as the Bachelorette, Lindsay remembers being against the fashion clichés of beading-and-sequined everything—until she laid eyes on the Randi Rahm gowns. “Cary [Feltman, the stylist for the Bachelor franchise] was like, ‘I thought you said you didn’t like that!,'” she said. “I would’ve been a hot mess on The Bachelorette if I hadn’t been picking her dresses.”

That happened again with her wedding dress: “I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, but she gets me and started pulling different dresses that, when I tried them on, I was like, ‘This is why I defer to you.’ She knows exactly what I need.”

Lindsay said that Rahm has taught her to “own the type of woman that you are” with fashion: “Don’t try to be anyone else. When you look at Randi’s stuff, it’s all original and have so many elements to them. I feel that’s very representative of my personality—you think you know, but you have no idea. Randi has taught me is to be me, be original, be unique, and always make a statement in whatever it is that you’re picking.”

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