Trash Your Wedding Dress: Appealing or Appalling

I ended up donating mine to good will. It was a 2500 dollar dress that I had no use for, nor did I want it around (We got divorced a year later) … I thought maybe someone else might have better luck with it, thought couldn’t afford a dress.

Wow, imagine the person that found that excellent buy! :slight_smile:

I agree with this, but at the same time, it’s her dress, she can do what she wants with it. And while selling or donating or somehow recycling the dress is a lovely idea, I can’t for the life of me figure out destroying it is inherently more “wasteful” than letting it rot in a closet, which is in fact what happens to most wedding dresses.

My daughter-in-law did this a year or so after the wedding, and the photos are great. I admit that when I heard the name “Trash the Dress” I was kinda freaked out, but the pictures are great. She went to a horse farm and there are pictures of her on a horse, playing on the green grass, and my favorite, jumping up, and lifting the dress just enough so thatyou can see that she’s wearing red high-top sneakers. My son did not re-rent a tux for the occasion, so he’s there in subdued business casual and not nearly so exubrant, but the pictures are really a lot livelier and more evocative than the formal wedding shots and I’m glad they got them.

Nothing happened to the dress except some incidental ordinary dirt, horse sweat, and a couple of grass stains. Part of the cost of teh shoot was having the thing cleaned, and she then donated it, so no loss. IOW she could still have done all those other things you do with a used wedding dress–cut it up for curtains, baby things, etc.

Obviously it’s her dress and she can do what she wants with it, but the thread solicits opinions of the practice. And it is inherently more wasteful to destroy something than to store it in the closet, rotting or not, because so long as it is in existence it has at least the potential to be put to some other use. Once it’s it’s gone, it’s gone. But it’s not like the only two choices for any of these brides are: (1) set fire to the dress or (2) put it in a closet until it rots, so the fact that the bride has another choice that is almost as bad doesn’t make this choice any good.

Exactly. I started this thread because it was something I hadn’t encountered before. Now, I suppose I’m as “anti-wedding” as the woman who started this trend, but then again, my anti-weddingness (how’s that for coining a word) didn’t manifest itself by spending a couple of thousand dollars on a dress only to destroy it. I’ve got much better things to spend the money on. As I said, I chose a dress in a color which suits me much better than white which I can wear again.

If I had got the stereotypical white dress which I’ll never wear again, I could see remaking it into a Christening gown or something. I’m afraid I just have a really hard time wrapping my head around the idea of spending over a thousand dollars on a dress I’ll only wear once, let alone deliberately ruining it. If I wanted a photo like some of the ones I’ve seen (Not the one where the woman’s wearing a burning dress! We’ve had enough of fire!), I’d rather do it in a cotton or muslin mock up of the dress. If I’d gone in for a beach wedding, I would have chosen a gown which could be worn at the beach without being ruined. Then again, what can you expect from a 40-something year old curmudgeon? :wink:

I understand it was a bride who came up with this idea, but I wonder if a lot of wedding photographers jump at the chance to make these kind of artsy “statements.” However you may feel about them, at least they’re unique and it must get tedious churning out the same kinds of photos week after week.

But since our wedding photog made off with a nice chunk of cash, not sure I feel much sympathy for them either.

That is some truly fine photography! I think it’s cool–why not? Yes, it’d be nice to recycle the dresses, but why not this? I like the one of the couple (I’m assuming it’s of the husband and wife)–that’s a nice addition to the traditional wedding album. None of them are really disrespectful of marriage or weddings, IMO. It helps that most of those women are drop dead gorgeous, of course. I like the drama of the photos and the juxtaposition. To just take scissors to it and hack it to bits? No.

My wedding dress is in a box in the closet. I doubt I could get into it now, but I know my daughter doesn’t want it-so what do I do with it? Yes, it’s selfish, but I don’t want to give it to GoodWill…
Or, what Jodi said…

I just wish that some of those women who use six acres of silk would send some of it to me instead of rubbing mud into it. I could put it to such use! I could dye it and embroider it and their dress would get a new life as… er, another dress.

Me, I want to get married in something like this if I ever actually get married. I look like crap in white, so why not gold? White’s a pretty recent development anyway. I’d embroider it by hand and tailor it for myself and and and…

That said, the water pictures are awfully pretty. And (somewhere) I have pictures of myself dead in my favorite red dress, so really I’m not too creeped out by the idea of other people doing it.

I trashed my dress last year. Here is one photo from the session. This is one of my favorites.

Not only did we get some really awesome pictures, but after my dress was cleaned, it looked like new! Even after swimming in the ocean!

If anyone has any questions, ask away.

For myself (someone who spent less than $125 on her dress and who no longer even knows for certain where it’s at), I think this is an incredibly interesting idea. I’d definitely do it, but undoubtedly on the cheap… meaning I’d hand someone a camera after picking out how to theme it and tell 'em to “Shoot!” :slight_smile:

But yeah, I can definitely see it being a good thing, no matter what your stance on costs or issues might be. It falls under the same heading, in my humble opinion, that all sorts of stuff like this does. One person thinks you’ve got to commemorate your Big Day with a fancy 'do and others think it’s more meaningful to have only the two of you at the J.P. If it makes it more special to take pictures funky pictures after the fact (a la mnemosyne’s terrific idea!) than more power to ya. I’d certainly LOVE to see them.

It looks like you had fun with some of the pictures. What was your dress made of that it held up that well?

I’m getting married on the beach and we were thinking that we might do some more risky beach-water photos that day. I keep joking that we could do a postcard with us mimicking some of the scenes from Sweeney Todd in the “by the sea” number. It’d be fun, and it’s rare that we actually take photos of ourselves.

It was actually made completely of this really heavy lace/beading. It must have weighed 20 lbs when I got wet and covered in sand.

So despite it being called “Trash the Dress”, you did not in fact actually trash it.

Hey, no problem.

Nice photos!

Know what I could get into? Trashing the dresses I wore as a bridesmaid. No good will ever come of those things, that’s for sure.

I am of two minds re: this whole “trash the wedding dress” trend. Sure, it’s the bride’s money, her dress, and she can do whatever the hell she wants with it. But, on some level, I still find it rather wasteful - there are so many women who wish they could afford a traditional white wedding dress but can’t. That said, I’m not averse to reusing the dress for something else - curtains, a dyed and altered evening gown, a child’s baptismal or First Communion gown, etc.

As for the dress I wore when I married my ex, it is currently sitting in a bag in a closet of my parent’s home, as are my sisters’ wedding gowns. None of us has had her gown professionally cleaned and stored. Given my current frame of mind regarding my marriage, I would just as soon trash it, but I feel it would be wasteful, plus my daughter or my niece might want it someday for their own weddings. My mom recently took out her own nearly-38-year-old wedding gown, which was sewn by my grandmother, and washed it by hand with liquid detergent. To her surprise, it did not fall apart and survived drip-drying as well. When my daughter saw it, she asked to wear it to her own wedding. It might not fit her, mostly because my mom is 5’2" and was rather thin at the time of her wedding, and I have a feeling my daughter will be somewhat taller and, well, not as skinny. We’re still hanging on to Mom’s dress as well as my own, just in case. She can always alter either, or even combine parts of both into one Franken-dress. :slight_smile: It’s up to her.