Heirloom, Vintage, and Not Quite New

Heirloom. Vintage. Pre-loved. Re-styled. Pre-owned. Re-cycled. Up-cycled.

Wearing a gown for your wedding that, strictly speaking, isn’t new can be a wonderful and lovely experience. It’s definitely a choice that I whole-heartedly endorse!

I know this is a relatively trendy idea right now, but wedding gowns have been re-styled and re-worn pretty much ever since there were wedding gowns. It took an extraordinary amount of resources and skilled labor to make a wedding dress, and wearing such a gown only once would have been inconceivable. Manufacturing processes are much different now, but I always think of a wedding gown as potentially having a long life, far beyond just one wedding day. 

My background is in theater, where it is also unthinkable to spend so much time, effort, and money to make a costume and then never use it again. When I started doing bridal alterations, over 20 years ago, my approach to alterations was (and is) influenced by my theatrical training. Whenever possible, I try to make my alterations reversible and re-alterable. 

I love working with heirloom, sample, and previously-worn gowns. For me, they are a chance to travel back in time and see what fabrics were fashionable, how dresses were made, and sometimes by whom. I love finding a union label, or maybe even a department store label. 

I’ve re-styled a gown from a first wedding that never happened, and repaired and updated a gown for the fifth(!) bride in the family to wear it.

I’ve removed sleeves, re-cut sleeves, and replaced old sleeves with new sleeves that I carefully researched to match the historical style of the dress. I’ve moved waistline seams, added panels to the bodice to make it bigger, let out darts, put in darts. I’ve cut down necklines, moved lace trim around, added new lace trim (carefully matched and tea-dyed to blend in), and  saved every tiny scrap and button (because you never know when that bit of lace might be needed).

I understand that an existing dress or gown can be a jumping-off point to something new, while keeping in mind that’s it also important to be true to the existing gown.

You can see some photos of gowns that I’ve reworked in my photo gallery.

As a side note, I also work with a lot of sample gowns.  A sample gown is not quite the same as wearing a gown “again.” Please see my blog post: Sample Gowns.