Long before she built a business that dressed brides, beauty queens and some of Boston's biggest names, Yolanda Cellucci was a teenager who could not afford a prom dress. She bought fabric with her own money, silver sequins and tulle, and sewed a gown herself. She wore it to the dance and was crowned prom queen that night. Cellucci, the Waltham fashion designer, boutique owner and philanthropist who spent more than four decades turning that same instinct into a fashion and beauty empire, died on September 8, 2026. She was 91.

Her business began, by her own account, out of necessity. Around 1967, financial strain left her losing her hair, and she started selling wigs, first to cancer and head-injury patients, then to salons and at wig parties she hosted in clients' living rooms across New England. A year later she opened her first storefront in Belmont, Massachusetts, with seven dresses and a handful of wigs on the racks, according to WBUR. The shop soon moved to Waltham and grew into Yolanda's, a single address that combined a bridal and fashion boutique with a full beauty salon and a health spa, complete with one of New England's first in-store swimming pools, a steam room and a sauna.

By the time the business marked its fourth decade, it had added photography, cake ordering, fittings and a bridal fitness program, and it carried close to ten million dollars in wedding and mother-of-the-bride gowns, with annual sales topping five million dollars. Joan Rivers and Eva Gabor shopped there. So did Fran Drescher, singer Natalie Cole and comedian Lenny Clarke, drawn as much by Cellucci herself, in her signature white ensembles, as by the dresses on the racks. "We feel from the moment they step in the foyer, there's a beautiful chandelier, a spiral staircase, the feeling of them stepping into a place that's a little bit of a fantasy land is what we wanted," she told WBUR in 2009.

Bridal shopping had changed too, she said. "Now they come in with no bra, no pantyhose, no nothing. They're covered with tattoos and they're looking for the slinkiest dress that's out there." In August 2009, after 41 years, she closed Yolanda's. She insisted the recession had nothing to do with it. "My family had been leaning on me to spend more time with them. I decided it was the right time," she told the Boston Globe.

Family had anchored Cellucci from the start. She married plumber Daniel B. Cellucci in May 1956 at Saint Jude Church in Waltham. He later built the mechanical contracting firm Dan-Cel Plumbing and Heating, whose success helped underwrite her own. The couple raised two daughters, according to Joyce Funeral Home: Sondra, who trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology and became a crystal couture gown designer known professionally as Sondra Celli, founding her own company in 1984 and later appearing on TLC's My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding and its spinoff Gypsy Sisters, and Linda Cole Petrosian, a runway and print model for Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue. Cellucci and Sondra later shared the stage at events such as a 2017 fashion show and interview hosted by Northern Essex Community College, tracing their shared path from a Waltham storefront to Swarovski crystal couture.

Linda died in January 2018, at 57. Cellucci later described driving her daughter to chemotherapy appointments nearly every day. "She'd come back to me and say, you know how lucky I am," Cellucci recalled. With Linda's son, Dimitri Petrosian, she created the Our Girl Linda benefit to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and in May 2020 she published a children's book, Lindy Lou and Her Dancing Shoes, drawn from her daughter's childhood. "I wanted to keep Linda's memory alive since she was so full of life," she said. Daniel died on August 27, 2021, at their home in Watertown, three months after the couple marked 65 years of marriage.

Cellucci kept working past the closing of her store, styling private clients and hosting a cable access show, Yolanda: Style and Glamour. Her fundraising, much of it channeled through the Waltham Lions Club, was credited with raising millions of dollars for local causes over her lifetime. In September 2024 she marked her 90th birthday with a fundraiser that brought in more than $90,000 for five local charities, including the Waltham Lions Club, the Middlesex Human Services Agency and the Salvation Army of Waltham. Reflecting on the skepticism she faced when she started out, she offered the advice she had lived by for decades: "Don't let anyone discourage you because they told me it wouldn't work. They told me that from the beginning. The banks told me it wouldn't work, but it did," she told CBS News Boston.

What Cellucci built has outlasted the store on Waverley Oaks Road. Her daughter Sondra continues to design crystal covered gowns under the Sondra Celli name a few miles from where Yolanda's once stood. The Our Girl Linda benefit still raises money for St. Jude in her late daughter's memory, and the Lindy Lou books remain in print for the same cause. Decades of Waltham Lions Club fundraising drives carry her name attached to sums that mattered to the people who received them, a record built one dress, one wig, one benefit at a time by a woman who once sewed her own way onto a dance floor.