For Natali Yegudayev, fashion began at home. Both of her grandmothers used to sew wedding dresses, while her mother passed down a knowledge of handcraft techniques including embroidery, knitting, and hand sewing. At 15, Yegudayev bought her first sewing machine and began experimenting. What started as curiosity gradually became a way of understanding herself and the world around her.
Today, as a third-year Fashion Design student at the University of Haifa, that early connection to making has developed into a practice where clothing carries personal, emotional, and cultural meaning. Her latest bridalwear project, created as part of her studies, explores the spiritual significance of the wedding day through a distinctly Jewish perspective, while reaching toward a feeling she believes can be understood far beyond one tradition: faith, hope, purity, and the possibility of a new beginning.
Her relationship with fashion became especially personal at 19, when she was injured and developed lymphedema. She began creating dresses for herself that exposed her “beautiful” leg while concealing the affected one. Designing her own clothes gave her a sense of control over the way she presented herself. More importantly, it revealed something about what fashion could offer her. “I realized that fashion was a place where I could create a different world for myself,” she says.
That idea of creating another world is present in her bridal project, although here the world she constructs is not only personal. It is spiritual. During a bridalwear course in her third year, Yegudayev knew that she wanted to create a bridal look without revealing necklines. The decision was not a reflection of how she dresses in everyday life, but rather an intentional choice to communicate a particular message through the garment. For her, the wedding is a moment that carries a sense of purity and significance across religions, a point of departure for a beautiful, free new life.
The dress translates that idea through a carefully controlled visual language. Everything is white: white tulle, white fabric, white fringe, white embroidery, and white doves representing peace. Each detail was selected according to what could symbolize freedom and contribute to the feeling of purity she wanted the piece to embody.
At the center of the design is a verse: “Our Father, our King, accept our prayer with mercy and favor.” Yegudayev chose these words because they express a request for God to receive and accept prayer. In the context of a Jewish wedding, she found particular meaning in the idea of the chuppah as a powerful moment for prayer, when a new home is being created and the future is still open. “When a new home is being created, it feels like a moment when you can ask for anything,” she explains.
Rather than allowing the religious references to become purely decorative, Yegudayev sought to make them part of the emotional construction of the garment. She used hand embroidery throughout the piece, describing it as almost “an emotional form of handwriting.” The handmade quality was important to her because it allowed the garment to carry something of the person who made it, rather than feeling entirely industrial or removed from human touch.
The most unusual element of the silhouette is the Torah scroll structures emerging from the waist and extending into the form of the dress. Yegudayev had never seen anyone approach the idea in this way before, which encouraged her to explore it further. Translating the concept into a functioning garment, however, required considerable experimentation. The scrolls had to maintain their recognizable shape while also supporting themselves without collapsing. After several attempts, she managed to construct them successfully, turning what began as a conceptual idea into one of the defining structural elements of the design.
For Yegudayev, the finished garment is ultimately about the emotional experience of the bride. She wants the woman wearing one of her designs to feel “as though, in that moment, she is the source of light in the world.” That sense of light is also central to the future she imagines for her brand, Natalie. She hopes the brand will represent “light and goodness,” while creating garments that reward attention. Her ambition is for someone to discover something new in a piece every time they look at it.
This attention to detail has become one of the lessons she is taking away from the project. Creating the collection made her increasingly curious about other designers whose work explores religion, heritage, and cultural identity. It also taught her to slow down and look more closely at the smallest components of a garment. “Even the smallest detail can tell an entire story,” she says.
Although the project originates in Jewish religious tradition, Yegudayev sees its emotional language as something wider. Faith and hope, she believes, are experiences shared across cultures and religions. Her position as a student at the University of Haifa, in a city where different religions and cultures live alongside one another, reinforces that perspective. Every fashion student brings elements of their own beliefs, background, and ideas into what they create, allowing clothing to become a space where different experiences can coexist.
There is also something deeply personal beneath the spiritual concept. Yegudayev admits that she continued changing the design until the very last moment, constantly adding new elements even before the final submission. Yet emotionally, she knew that the piece had reached a point of completion because she had placed her “whole heart” and all of her emotional questions into it.
The embroidered prayer became a way of expressing uncertainty without needing to resolve it. For Yegudayev, it represents the decision to make a request and then release the responsibility of knowing what will happen next—to place that uncertainty in God’s hands.
In that sense, the bridal dress becomes more than an object of ceremony. It becomes an expression of hope at the precise moment when a future is beginning. Through white fabric, hand embroidery, Torah-inspired structures, and a simple prayer, Natali Yegudayev turns bridalwear into a language of faith and possibility. The garment does not promise to know what comes next. Instead, it asks, hopes, and lets go.
