‘It made a great corpse bride costume’: meet the women recycling and reusing their wedding dresses
Catherine O’Nolan wears her wedding dress every year on her anniversary, regardless of where she is or what she is doing. That meant she once wore it on a ferry. She has also worn it to walk the dog on the beach near her home in Suffolk. She has eaten fish and chips in it, cut the grass in it, flown to Dublin in it. It’s not just any old frock; made by the bridal specialist Jenny Packham, there is no mistaking what it is. Strangely, she says, nobody ever says a word.
O’Nolan is one of a number of women who refuse to consign their wedding dresses to the back of the wardrobe – whether by repurposing them, recycling them or simply reusing them as they are. Some are building in flexibility ahead of the wedding, opting for outfits that will transition smoothly from aisle or register office to boardroom or holiday. After all, single-use dresses are bad for the environment and the bank balance, with the average British wedding dress last year costing nearly £1,400.
Anita Gera was one of those who answered our call for stories about reusing wedding clothes. She got married in Copenhagen in 2006, and has continued to wear the constituent parts ofher outfit – a tunic, trousers and dupatta (a long scarf) – to parties, although the marriage is now over. On a recent mini-cruise with her mum to Hamburg, a gala night provided an opportunity to wear the whole ensemble. It helps that it is bright red. “I grew up in India,” she explains, “so, to me, white is the colour of funerals and red is the colour you wear for joyous occasions.” While she wouldn’t wear her outfit in India, she felt comfortable on the cruise ship: “I know it’s my wedding outfit but to most people it will just look like some glamorous Bollywoodstyle outfit.”
Sophie Pollard also bought an outfit she could wear again. Having met her wife at primary school in the Somerset village of Westbury-sub-Mendip, she married her in the local register office last year. She found the navy dress decorated with sunflowers for £14 on the internet; it has seen outings to the dental laboratory (where she makes false teeth), as well as to a friend’s wedding where she was “best man” – she paired it with a black jacket to “jazz it up a bit”.
Sanji, who married in 2017, has already reworn the lehenga (full anklelength skirt) she wore then and plans to bring out her entire outfit later this month for a teej party, a traditional Nepalifestival where women dress up, often in red.
The single-use frock remains the rule rather than the exception – 79% of women still buy theirs at a wedding dress specialist, according to the wedding planning app Bridebook – presumably making them less wearable after the ceremony. But, even here, there are attempts to improve sustainability, with brands such as Reformation and Mother of Pearl using recycled fabrics and natural dyes. Secondhand gowns can be found everywhere from Oxfam to eBay, while companies that hire out wedding dresses, such as the Bridal Gallery and Girl Meets Dress, are on the rise.
It can’t come too soon for the Dublin-based sustainability advocate Emma Gleeson. While much of the world is paring back in the name of the planet, she says, “the wedding thing seems to be getting more and more extreme”. For evidence, see the growing trend for multiple wedding outfits, as worn by the Duchess of Sussex and the singer Solange Knowles. For her own wedding, Gleeson settled on a white dress with a pattern on it. Not only did she want something she could wear again, but she disliked much of the culture surrounding wedding dresses. “I could see how bad my friends were made to feel by the shopping experience – people saying: ‘Oh well, you’ll be a size smaller by the time you wear this’ … horrible things like that.”
Lesley Kazan-Pinfield was rejecting this kind of talk as long ago as 1980, when she wore a pair of homemade dungarees to get married at Truro register office. She continued to wear them until they fell apart.
Other women find ways to recycle their dresses, beyond handing them down or selling them. It was only a week or two after her wedding in Burnley, 16 years ago, that Shaista got a call about a woman who lived in her mum’s old neighbourhood in Pakistan. Her husband had just died. “She had three or four young children. In Pakistan, there’s no welfare state, so Mum rang me saying: ‘Can you contribute anything? I’m having a whip-round.’”
Shaista decided to donate her wedding dress. When it made it to the woman, “She just burst into tears – she saw it as ‘I’m going to be less reliant’” than if she had just been given some one-off money. The woman began charging people to borrow it for the day; as Shaista describes it, it was “a micro-business for her, a wedding dress for those who could never afford to buy”.
There are a number of charities that use old gowns for new purposes. When Georgia Keogh-Horgan got married in 2013 in a secondhand dress from eBay, she thought that it might be something a future child would be able to wear. Tragically, her son died just hours after birth, but she found a charity called Cherished Gowns that turned wedding dresses into funeral gowns for babies. “I think my wedding dress has been made into 11 gowns and little nappies. Babies who are born very small don’t always have nappies that fit,” she explains. “When your baby dies, you still want to dress them normally … Little things like that are quite important.”
The repurposing of wedding outfits fits in with today’s fashion for crafts – sales of sewing machines have risen, and YouTube is now full of tutorials on how to knit hats and darn socks. But it has been going on for decades. When Lyn Armstrong got married in Sheffield in 1971, she didn’t have any preconceived notions of recycling her dress. Then, a few years later and six months pregnant, she needed an outfit for a dinner dance and didn’t want to buy something that she would probably never wear again. So she set to work turning her wedding dress into something inspired by Mary Quant. It seemed, she says, a “very appropriate fate for a wedding dress to become a maternity garment”.
For her part, Mia Smith turned a section of her wedding dress into a stole when she was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2013, as well as fashioning others into christening gowns for her grandchildren. Ann Hill turned her wedding dress into a tennis outfit when money was short in the 1970s, while Angela Lorenz, a contemporary artist, cut her wedding dress up “for art”. Pieces of it are now in the British Library and other museums around the world.
Rachael Falkner, who got married in Oxfordshire in 1990, discovered that her wedding dress was starting to yellow. So, a couple of years ago, after much pestering, she agreed to let her daughter use it as a corpse bride Halloween costume. “My friends were shocked. One described it as like using 100-yearold wine for beef bourguignon.” But “it made a great costume and we’ve had a good laugh out of it”.
And then there are reuses that deliver much-needed catharsis. Lucy Morgan’s white wedding dress stayed in the loft for a long time after her wedding in 2002. But the year she got divorced and turned 50, she retrieved it and dyed it green. It was a meaningful move for her: “New life, new growth,” she explains.
Melanie Renn got married in the Appalachians in 1984. Twenty years into the marriage her husband left her. “I loved that dress and I’m sure I could have worn it again,” she says. Instead, she gave it to his new girlfriend, who was “thrilled”. The decision was an impulse but Renn stands by it: “I couldn’t bear to look at it any more. Everything that reminded me of him had to go.” It was, she says, the “best repurpose ever”.