When one mother started mocking her daughter, the TLC star couldn’t believe it.
14 years on Say Yes to the Dress, bridal consultant Randy Fenoli has seen brides through it all. But one particular appointment will likely stick out in his mind forever … and not in a good way.
While speaking to Insider, the 57-year-old designer reflected on the time a bride named Samantha and her mother, Diana, walked into Kleinfeld Bridal. As captured on the TLC show in the clip below, Randy was appalled by the way Diana treated her daughter after the bride-to-be tried on and fell in love with a Pnina Tornai gown. Her mother called the dress “ugly” despite saying she loved the way it looked on a mannequin and even dished out fake compliments.
Shocked by Diana’s behavior, Randy couldn’t help but take a step back from the appointment as Samantha and Diana argued.
“I’m really that upset. I didn’t want to stay in the appointment any longer,” Randy said while walking away from Samantha in the clip. “How can you treat your child that way? I’m disgusted, I really am. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Randy later engaged with Samantha and told her it was hard for him to wrap his head around the fact that Diana would “alienate her only daughter over a dress.” In the end, Samantha left Kleinfeld without the gown.
To Insider, Randy recalled how much that incident really bothered him.
“There was a mother that was absolutely just mocking her daughter and laughing at her and humiliating her,” Randy remembered. “I had to walk out of the appointment. I was so disgusted.”
He also added, “You have somebody like myself who has never had the honor to have children and the privilege to be able to raise a child, but you have had that and this is the way you treat them.”
In the end, Randy’s goal is to help the bride score the dress of their dreams, which sometimes means jumping into defense mode.
“When they feel beautiful, they wear that dress like there is no other dress on the planet,” he explained.
As for the drama that played out between Samantha and Diana and on every other Say Yes to the Dress episode, Randy once told Good Housekeeping that everything you see is totally real and not dramatized.
“I truly believe the audience can tell when it’s being faked, and I think that’s one of the successes of our show … it’s real,” he previously said. “You’re seeing my reaction or the consultant’s [genuine] reaction.”
In other words, Randy really was that upset about the Diana-Samantha incident.