Trash the dress: 25 years later
As we closed in on our 25th anniversary, my wife and I considered how we might commemorate it. Previous milestone anniversaries were marked with less than favorable events. Our one year anniversary, scheduled to be celebrated in St. Lucia, took place five days after 9/11. While we did travel to Bali for our 10 year, our plan to hit the Maldives for our 20th was thwarted by a little event called COVID. For this next milestone, considering much of our budget was tied up in college tuition, we considered another approach.
Sitting in the far back of a closet, washed and folded in a sealed “preservation box” was my wife’s wedding dress. We weren’t super sentimental about keeping it, but my Mom insisted. Now some 25 years later we decided that maybe there might be a second use for it. So we dug it out, she tried it on, and it still fit (I never doubted it would). We did a quick shoot in the woods near our home that day to document the dress, in its original form.
Our son, now 19, was in his second year as a design major at Savannah College of Art and Design. I had also just booked a wedding that would take place in Savannah around our anniversary date. Maybe we could do a “trash the dress” session while in town and let our son add his own flair to the dress to help us reimagine it.
Over the past few years he had gotten into silkscreening to make merch for his band. Together with the help of my wife, an art director, the two of them came up with a plan to silkscreen colored flowers onto the dress as a nod to the original floral embroidery. We discussed shape, size, and colors. Foster hand drew a few options and we chimed in until we were all on the same page.
He then spent the next week mixing colors to complement the dress and her hair color and transferring his magic onto her dress. My team and I arrived a few days before the wedding we were shooting and made a formal plan for our “trash the dress” session that would follow.
We all met up early the day after the wedding and headed to one of the beautiful squares in Savannah. The dress looked fantastic. With the help of our son, his partner, and Denida, my second shooter, we celebrated that 25th exactly how we had imagined it, and without global incident.
What’s your plan for your anniversary? Wanna get dressed back up and play for the day?
b+w photos credit: our own wedding photographer, Peter Doyle