I just got an e-mail from a photography studio informing me there was a new custom known as “trashing your wedding dress” and offering to take photos of it. Here’s an article about it. Basically, a few years ago, a woman who the article describes as being pretty anti-wedding decided to take a photo of herself wearing her wedding dress in a spring in Nevada after her wedding. This, of course, ruined the $2,500 dress. This has led to a trend where other women get photos taken of them in their dresses doing things in settings which lead to the dress being damaged or destroyed. The women who are doing this think it’s better than saving the dress. One comment I found in a blog while I was Googling the subject said she had no interest in leaving her dress to her daughter because styles will probably have changed.
Fellow Dopers, what’s your take on this? My immediate reaction is I think it’s one of the most appalling wedding-related ideas I’ve come across. Then again, I had a friend make a dress which looks great and which I intend to wear again on special occaisions. Even if I’d spent over $1,000 USD on a dress I’d never wear again, I can’t imagine destroying it. The whole idea’s counter to everything I associate with a wedding. Then again, I’m pretty unconvetional.
I enjoy reading your opinions. Let’s hear them. It looks like quite a few photo studios are doing this. Does it sound like a good idea to you?
I think it’s funny and kind of cool. Then again, the woman in the pic had a pretty nice dress that looks rewearable, so…I don’t know, I’m kind of torn. If I had one that nice, and that wasn’t a typical long veil/long skirt white dress, I might want to keep it.
I’ve seen some really neat TTD (“Trash The Dress”) pics on photography forums - arty shots of hot women ripping silk apart in a frenzy in disused warehouses, etc.
An album of those photos has got to be worth a couple of grand’s worth of dress that would likely only moulder in a box at the back of a wardrobe. Hell yes!
The wedding cake is much worse. That’s being disrespectful to your new husband as well as generally crass and disgusting. (Not that I think women have to respect their husbands more than the husband has to respect his wife. The whole ‘take the garter off with your teeth’ thing makes the groom look as crass as the bride smashing cake in the groom’s face. Urgh. Why can’t people just act dignified or at least tasteful for one day in their lives?)
If a woman wants to ruin a dress she just spent an ungodly amount of money on shrug whatever. I wouldn’t do it. Even if you don’t want to save the wedding dress, there’s lots of other things you can do with it.
I would do that in a heartbeat.
After our Vegas wedding I came home and threw my gown in a box I have filled with various costumes. The bottom was filthy and probably even ripped after walking around and partying in Vegas all night after our reception. It was only $400, but even if it’d been $4000, I didn’t see any reason to keep it. My husband pulled it out of the box and gave me the money to take it to the cleaners to have it cleaned and preserved, which I did. It now sits in his closet collecting dust in a huge ass box.
A few months after that I needed to pouf a Halloween costume a bit, so I pulled out the crinoline skirt I used under the dress. I had a pair of scissors halfway down where I intended to cut it when my husband asked me what I had and what I was doing with it. When I told him it was the skirt I wore under my wedding gown, both he and my son scowled and insisted I not cut it up.
So, it hangs in my closet now collecting dust.
I’d take having a few awesome pictures of me, ohh I don’t know, maybe soaked in ‘pig’s blood’ a la ‘Carrie’ over hanging on to them anyday.
My dress cost around $150; is that considered acceptable to use for this purpose?
It’s not like a dress is an investment that can be cashed in. There’s no appreciation of value. Most dresses bought from wedding stores (barring the extremely expensive) are cheaply made even though they cost a lot, with glued-on beads and machine-sewn seams. If a woman doesn’t want to keep her dress, that’s all right with me.
Mine hangs in my closet; my mother’s did too. I amuse myself by putting it on at a few wedding anniversaries, but if I could think of something amazing to do in it that just happened to destroy the dress, that would be fine as well.
Seems sad to me, but I think of my wedding gown as a treasured keepsake–maybe one of very few things I’d pack in a cedar chest and keep forever. It didn’t cost much at all, but it’s handmade and gorgeous and I would never,* never *purposely destroy it.
My opinion exactly. You do what you want to with your stuff. Me? I’ve worn a wedding dress twice in my life; both were home-made. I still have them, but it’s not like I’m out thousands of dollars if they burnt up in a fire or anything.
I think that if I were to spend thousands on a dress, I woudln’t trash it, but that’s just me. It seems stupid to throw all that money away.
I don’t see it as any big artsy statement, just kind of bizarre. I love my dress too much to destroy it, even though it will probably never serve another purpose again.
Personally I think it’s horribly wasteful. You could sell the dress on eBay, then the fabric is recycled and someone else gets a dress on the cheap. Or donate it to a charity thrift shop, even if it only sells for $20 that’s $20 more than the charity had before. And again, some else gets a dress for a wedding or dress-up or to remake for prom.
But it’s other peoples money. I guess you could trash the dress and then still recycle the fabric, but then all the handiwork is lost. And in the grand scheme of things it’s not that much fabric, compared to what a woman buys in her lifetime.
I think it’s kind of a shame–you could at least donate it so that someone who can’t afford to have a fancy dress can use it. Why destroy something? Actually, now that I think of it, it strikes me as another symbol of wealth–“Look, I can afford to buy a really fancy wedding dress and then destroy it!” Like the fashion of getting a white dress in the first place was (“I’m wealthy enough to buy a one-use dress”), only even more so.
My dress was sewn by my mom and I’m rather fond of it, so no, I wouldn’t. (It doesn’t take up any space either, since it was a pretty basic dress.)
I love the pictures linked to in the article. Some of them are the most gorgeous wedding-related pictures I’ve ever seen, and almost all of them are much more interesting than your typical wedding pictures. Would I do this with my wedding dress? Never say never. (Of course, I don’t like my wedding dress much, though.)
Interesting trend. I am not one to hang on to material things, and as long as I still have the photos of me in my wedding dress that is enough for me.
I was looking at a People magazine recently and saw Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon’s wedding photos. They walked out into the ocean after the ceremony which I thought was charming (really!) as I think they are a cute couple.
I never thought about the fact that she was “trashing” her wedding dress, though. I would imagine that salt water and whatever kind of silk the material was are not friends. The article said they wanted to see the color of the material in the water as it turned a pale pink when wet.
I’ve seen several trash the dress photo shoots and they all turn into excellent photos. It’s not something I would do though, because I expect my (yet to be conceived) daughter to wear my dress. It’s timeless.
Spending a fortune on a wedding dress is an abomination, but destroying it to get a picture somehow seems less wasteful to me than encasing the dress in plastic until your heirs toss it when they clean out your house after you die.
I think that’s rather shortsighted. Style in a wedding dress has more to do with the occasion and the individual wearing the dress than with current fashion. My wife wore her aunt’s wedding dress from about 35 years prior and it looked great. It was especially nice to have the feeling of connection with family history.
