Bride Surprises Everyone at Ceremony by Walking Down Aisle in Mom’s Wedding Dress: ‘Not a Dry Eye in Sight’ (Exclusive)

One mother “broke down in tears” when she saw her daughter’s wedding ceremony surprise.

Not long after Rachel Ous got engaged to Jake Ous, her mother, Christine Phinney, gave the bride-to-be her 1996 wedding dress. Phinney told Rachel she could “rip it up and use it for anything [she] wanted,” but Phinney never expected her to walk down the aisle in it.

“The bride’s mom said, ‘Oh, my God’ and broke down in tears,” Hanna Defoe, owner and lead planner of Hanna Marie Events, tells PEOPLE.

The wedding content creator recalls the shock that waved through the couple’s 190 guests when Rachel made her way down the aisle wearing her mother’s vintage gown on May 31 at Olive Branch Farm in Kasota, Minnesota.

“She was already emotional prior to her daughter walking down the aisle but she was not expecting this!” Defoe says.

No one was expecting the ceremony surprise — apart from Defoe, the wedding photographer, and a few bridesmaids who helped Rachel quickly change out of a decoy wedding dress that she wore for group photos earlier in the day to throw everyone off.

“There was not a dry eye in sight,” Defoe remembers. “Everyone, including bridesmaids, family and friends, were emotional and were so impressed with the surprise of a lifetime when talking to the couple afterward.”

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Back when Phinney gave her daughter her wedding dress, she thought she’d use it for her welcome dinner or afterparty. After the welcome dinner came and went, and Rachel still hadn’t worn the dress, Phinney grew more and more curious about when and how it would make an appearance.

“She was asking my bridesmaids during the day when I was wearing it but they were stone cold in keeping the surprise,” Rachel says. “She may have thought it was a party dress for later in the reception, since it had a shorter underskirt, but she never would have guessed I was wearing it for the ceremony.”

Rachel’s aunt made the dress — which features two draping strings of pearls on the back — for Phinney’s March 1996 wedding, then altered it for Rachel’s big day nearly three decades later. It was “almost like it was meant to be” because the dress barely needed any alterations. Only the sleeves and length of the underskirt were changed. Otherwise, “the dress fit like a glove.”

Rachel’s father was just as surprised when he saw the dress being worn again for the first time in 29 years.

” ‘Wait, is that your mom’s dress?’ ” Rachel recalls her dad asking her. “He was impressed that I was wearing it, specifically the fact that it fit so well, and fit my style (I was very particular about the design and vibe of the wedding).”

Rachel embraced both of her parents when she made it to the end of the aisle. She loved her dress so much that she decided to keep it on for the remainder of the celebration.

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“The original plan was not to leave the dress on all night long — considering I bought a dress for the wedding other than hers — but the dress was so perfect, comfortable and cute that I couldn’t take it off!” Rachel says.

Clips of the bride’s parents’ sweet and emotional reactions to the dress were recently posted by Defoe on TikTok, and have already amassed more than 100,000 views and nearly 20,000 likes.

“That man watched a woman in that dress walk toward him on his wedding day and had to walk his baby in the same dress to her man on her wedding day day 🥺🥺🥺,” the top comment reads.

“Yet another day of me crying over a stranger on the internet 😭,” one TikTok user commented, with another writing, “This is the sweetest thing I’ve EVER seen😭😭❤️❤️❤️.”