In closets everywhere hang memories of walks down the aisle. Wedding dresses that girls grew up dreaming about. Dresses that hushed a crowd at first sight and caused mothers to reach for tissues.
Traditionally, after the big day, brides clean and preserve their gowns in the hope a daughter might wear it.
These days, that rarely happens. Styles change, and most brides prefer to pick their own dress. Even if they don't, who has the space to store such a cumbersome item for possibly decades?
Instead, more brides are turning to creative and thoughtful ways to reuse their gowns, beyond covering it with fake blood and wearing it for Halloween as the Bride of Frankenstein. Here are a few examples, from trash-the-dress events to seamstress makeovers.
Trash it!
Even before she started shopping for her wedding dress, Emily Williamson wanted to trash it. It had to be something fun and unique to match her live-life-to-the-fullest attitude.
"You can pass your dress down to your children and grandchildren, but I wanted to pass down who I was, not just the dress,'' she said.
A few months after her May 7 wedding at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, she and her husband, Preston, did a trash-the-dress photo shoot with Divine Light Photography.
The couple spent a rainy afternoon splashing around downtown Tampa in their wedding best -- and roller skates. Photographers shot them sitting in the middle of a wet Florida Avenue, kissing. Another shows Emily, 25, thigh deep in a fountain.
"At one point it got very messy and I thought, 'What am I doing?' '' she said.
The result was better than she and her husband expected. Surprisingly, the shoot didn't ruin the $1,500 dress, prompting Emily to ponder a trash-the-dress do-over.
Sell it!
Cindy Almanzar thought a simple, diamond-white mermaid gown by Allure Bridal was the perfect dress for her Nov. 6 wedding.
That is until calls started coming from family in the Dominican Republic who wanted their handmade dresses to match. What's the fabric? Any sequins or embellishments?
Ah, well, actually, no, she said. "My dress is pretty plain.''
Too plain, it turns out.
Almanzar, 26, bought a second, more elaborate gown and posted her first dress for sale on eBay and Craigslist. A few months later, the $940 dress still hung in her closet.
Disappointed, she stumbled across preownedweddingdresses.com and paid the $25 fee to post her dress online.
The next day, it sold. A Tampa doctor, who also had regrets about her first purchase, bought it for $750.
"I was just completely shocked,'' Almanzar said.
A few weeks before the wedding, she's already thinking about selling her actual dress on the same site.
Remake it!
When Jessica Karcher Fladd got married in 2005, she knew she wanted to do something special with her wedding dress.
Keeping it for a daughter sounded nice, but not realistic. Even in the off chance that she would want to wear her dress, storing it didn't seem feasible.
So she decided she would turn it into a christening gown for a future child.
"I was trying to find a way to keep it but not store it,'' she said. "My husband and I move around a lot with his job, and he's not one for keeping things. I was avoiding the inevitable of him tossing it out.''
When Fladd, now 27, found out she was pregnant with a girl a few years later, her mother, Karla Karcher, took the gown to a seamstress. Snip, snip and she made a christening dress out of some of the train.
Taylor Ann Fladd wore it to her baptism, and there's "still plenty of fabric for future grandchildren,'' noted her happy grandmother.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
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