“What just happened?”: Newly-engaged Desiré Inglander shares her side of the story – and wedding plans so far

It’s been kind of a wild ride for Desiré Inglander lately. In the past few months the 23-year-old Swedish model and influencer has, in no particular order, been photographed for Tommy Hilfiger in Stockholm, attended the Olympics in Paris, sat front row at Bottega Veneta in Milan (not to mention Dior, Hermès, and Nina Ricci – again, in Paris) and hung out in the pit at a Formula 1 race in Austin. Whoops, nearly forgot – she also got engaged to longtime boyfriend and pole vault champion Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis by way of a proposal on an East Hampton beach captured by Vogue Scandinavia on the set of this photoshoot (in fact, the shoot proved the perfect smokescreen for Duplantis to truly surprise Inglander when he got down on one knee). Our moving digital cover, which announced the couple’s engagement to the world, has since racked up over 13 million views.

When I reach Inglander in the couple’s Louisiana apartment (Duplantis is half-Swedish, half-American and does most of his training in the US) a couple of weeks after the engagement, she’s still processing recent events. “When I look back at everything I’m like, ‘What just happened?’” She says, giggling. “I’m just looking at me as a young kid, I would have never believed myself if I saw this.”

It’s early where she is and Inglander, who has just come back from working out (something she doesn’t love doing, despite her fiancé’s job), wears a black sports bra and black leggings, her long blonde hair in a high pony. As she moves her hands, that big, beautiful diamond ring catches the morning light. Engagement aside, the biggest dream-come-true moment so far is appearing in Vogue Scandinavia. “I’m not just saying that because I’m speaking to you,” she assures me. “That’s surreal – I think that’s crazy.”

Related: “I was more nervous than at the Olympics”: How Mondo Duplantis planned his elaborate secret proposal to Desiré Inglander

In many ways, Inglander’s trajectory towards this moment began when she met Duplantis at a Midsummer party in 2020. But it wasn’t, as previously reported by this very magazine, a chance meeting through mutual friends. “He DM’d me months before, like February that year,” says Inglander. This, I tell her, is breaking news. Given that Duplantis arrived at the party at around 2am, the specific details of that first in-person meeting are a bit hazy, but she recalls her friends saying something like, ‘Isn’t that the guy that DM’d you?’ At any rate, Inglander wasn’t really in the headspace to start a great romance and as a result, played the interaction pretty cool. “I had just graduated high school, I was not interested in anybody at the time,” she says. “He felt like I had rejected him right away.”

Related: Follow It-girl Desiré Inglander around Paris Fashion Week

Luckily, Duplantis persisted. At last he got her to agree to a date just before he returned to the States to continue his training. “I actually didn’t want to go for dinner, because I was so scared,” says Inglander. “I had never been on a date.” So they went for drinks, at the “cute bar” next to the Italian restaurant Trattorian in Kungsholmen and the rest, as they say, is history. There is, however, one last bombshell twist: part of the reason Duplantis showed up at the Midsummer party in the first place was because he noticed Inglander was marked “attending” in the event group on Facebook.