Sometimes, when a sliver of good timing reveals itself, it’s necessary to seize the moment. For supermodel Devon Windsor’s fiancé, Johnny Dex, that perfect moment to pop the question happened to fall just one week after he first began to plotting the proposal.
“He’s very creative and good at planning shoots and such,” Windsor, 24, tells The Knot. “So he planned it in just one week.” The Victoria’s Secret model explains that Dex originally wanted to do the proposal in a “much more chill, quaint and private way,” possibly toward the end of summer, but once he had secured the ring, he felt anxious about waiting the two or three months to propose.
“He said, ‘I can’t just have this sit in my office for three months, this is going to bother me. I have to do this now,’” Windsor says with a laugh. And so Dex, who owns a retail company, called his love’s manager, who informed him that the next available window of time Windsor had free happened to be that coming weekend.
So Dex got to work.
“He planned this whole thing with my agents. They were lying to me all week saying I had a job in New York and I had to go to NYC instead of Miami [where Dex is based],” Windsor says. “Then that job got canceled and I got a job in the Bahamas that they made up. He created a call sheet and they even sent it to me. It was a fake call sheet for a brand I work for all the time.”
Dex had to make sure that he covered his own tracks as well, going to “great lengths” to make sure that Windsor didn’t suspect the impending engagement. He told her that he had a golf tournament, and hence couldn’t meet her in the Bahamas; he even created a fake golf shirt for a made-up tournament, taking photos of his golf clubs.
“He bought a phone and shared his location from that phone so if I checked his location, it showed up from that phone,” Windsor says. “He went above and beyond, because he knows that I’m very snoopy, and I usually figure everything out. So he did everything to make sure I didn’t spoil the surprise.”
On the day of the proposal, Windsor flew on a seaplane with a videographer, who was there under the pretense of shooting a behind-the-scenes video. “I thought I was working,” Windsor said. But as the plane circled lower and closer to a body of land surrounded on three sides by clear blue water, she saw a literal sign.
“It said ‘Marry Me,’ and I was freaking out,” Windsor recalls. “Then the pilot flew so low and so slow that I could make eye contact with Johnny and it was insane. When he landed, Johnny proposed, and the whole thing was filmed.”
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I’ll never finish falling in love with you…… ladies and gents, my fiancé!!!!
Windsor says she was “just shocked” and didn’t quite know how to react, but naturally said “Yes!” to her boyfriend of two years (they first met some six years ago through mutual friends, then reunited randomly for a shoot in Miami). The ring that Dex presented her was quite the stunner as well, a bauble from the Ring Concierge featuring a 5-carat stone with a hidden halo. “It was amazing,” she says.
And now, the Model Squad star has a whole other litany of choices to make as she starts to prepare for wedding planning. Luckily for her, however, her mother-in-law has great experience in that department, after helping her first daughter get married before 800 guests.
“A lot goes into a wedding, which I don’t think I realized,” Windsor says. “And [my mother-in-law] has already brought out all the binders, so we’ll see!”
Tune in to see a new episode of Model Squad each night at 8 p.m. ET during New York Fashion Week.
—With Reporting By Esther Lee.
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