Till dress do us part
By Lauren Baron
lbaron@uwo.ca
It’s an agonizing decision. Women dream about it, lose weight to get into it, and pay a lot of money to wear it. It’s a lot of pressure, just to say yes to the wedding dress.
“The dress is a key factor in setting the tone and theme of the person’s wedding. It’s something that is going to be viewed in photographs forever,” said Isabel Prtenjaca Traher, manager of operations for Sophie’s Gown Shoppe, which has locations in London, Kitchener and Windsor.
The dress becomes a symbol of the bride’s future and marriage, Traher said. So, “A lot of these brides want to look perfect, and a lot of them hope that one day maybe their daughter will wear it.”
But not Vanessa Sehmrau.
She got married two years ago, but even before the big day, she had no plans to keep her dress.
 |
| Courtesy of Gail Edwin-Fielding |
| Vanessa Sehmrau, volunteer, and Helen Sweet, owner of the Brides’ Project in Toronto, collect and sell donated wedding dresses. |
“I wasn’t a person who thought that the dress played a huge role in my day. Obviously I had to have a wedding dress because I was getting married, but my wedding dress was not at the top of the list,” Sehmrau said.
She looked into renting a dress for the day, but couldn’t find a place close enough to her home in Toronto. Instead, she stumbled across a store called the Brides' Project, a bridal gown and accessory store in Toronto that sells donated wedding dresses for discount prices and sends money to charities that help children with cancer.
Sehmrau managed to buy a dress worth $2,000 from the store for only $750. Shortly after the big day, she donated it right back.
“I’m a very non-traditional person,” said Sehmrau. “The idea of wearing a dress for a few hours, it just seemed like such a waste to put a big chunk of money towards it and I wasn’t going to hand it down to my kids or make christening gowns out of it.”
She’s not the only one. Sehmrau volunteers at The Brides' Project and says they receive an average of one wedding dress donation per day. And there are more than 1,000 listings at present for wedding dresses for sale in Toronto on the free classifieds website Kijiji. Closer to home, there are more than 450 listings on the London Kijiji site.
Heading into peak wedding season, tradition is something most women are concerned about, but the number of wedding gowns currently up for sale or donation shows that many brides are bucking the custom when it comes to the dress.
But for Jacky Harrison, a volunteer at the Brides' Project, the decision to get rid of the dress isn’t so easy.
“I’ve only been married for two years,” Harrison said. “I just think it hasn’t been long enough.”
She was pregnant when she wore it and finding the perfect dress was difficult. It was a struggle to find one that was just right, so she had it specially made by a friend and she fell in love with it. But she’s not sure she’s ready to let it go just yet.
Harrison’s not the only bride who has struggled with this choice. She’s seen her share of women come in to the store to donate their dresses and have a hard time saying goodbye to them. Ultimately they give the dresses up, said Harrison, “but if the marriage didn’t work out, it’s a little easier.”
That’s because the dress becomes a symbol of the marriage, said Traher. To many women, the perfect dress represents the perfect marriage.
“The dress is so unusual and unique that it sort of acquires this aura about it,” said Jenny Bisch, assistant curator at the Costume Museum of Canada in Winnipeg. “That’s why people are so eager to keep it as a memento, and why women save the dress for their daughters, because it has a unique significance to that of a married woman.”
Whatever Harrison ends up doing with her dress, it won’t just sit in a box under her bed or in her closet. “It’s all about repurposing,” Harrison said.
“I will get rid of it eventually. I’ll probably donate it or I might make it into something for my daughter.”
Kelly Showers, 36, of London, wouldn’t even consider getting rid of her dress after her September wedding this year.
 |
| Courtesy of Kelly Showers |
| Kelly Showers wants to turn her wedding dress into mementoes for her future children. |
“To me, I’ve grown up thinking about my wedding, planning my wedding, and to me the dress is a big symbol of the relationship – the commitment – and it’s a way of me expressing myself,” said Showers.
She plans on following her mother’s tradition by turning her wedding dress into a ring-bearer pillow, guest-book cover and photo album cover for her future children.
“I’m a very sentimental person, so it means a lot to me to have that part of my parents with me on my wedding day. I hope it will mean the same to my children as it did to me by having our wedding relived through them,” said Showers.
The pressure to keep the dress comes from the idea that it’s tradition to do so, said Bisch.
Previous generations of brides often kept their dresses in order to pass them down to their daughters.
But keeping your wedding dress for sentimental purposes is on its way out, Bisch said.
“When you look back in history, traditions have always been changing. I can appreciate that (the wedding dress tradition) is changing because traditions always did; it just didn’t feel like they did. Tradition changes just as much as any other part of our culture.”
She cites the white wedding dress as something most people think has been the norm forever. But the first example of a white gown was the one Queen Victoria wore for her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840; even then, the tradition didn’t really catch on until the 1950s, Bisch said.
Before that, most women wore their best dress on their wedding day or bought something they could wear again.
Since Sehmrau can’t re-wear her long white gown again, she doesn’t see the point in keeping it.
“(The dress) would just take up space. I’m a bit of a clothes hog and I don’t have huge closets, so to have to store something that I’m not wearing or using didn’t seem like it was a wise thing to do.”
