The Top 40

Oh Amour !

There is always the second hand boutiques, Good Will, and people who would like ( I almost wrote "love" )to use the beautiful fabric again.

I think women think they will take the dress out, try it on over the years and show others. Some think they will wear it when they celebrate an anniversary and repeat their vows. They are the lucky ones. (Neoneocon has saved and still fits into her wedding dress even though divorced)

The women in my wife's family have a tradition that daughters must be married in dresses they have made. (This is not because they can't afford $3500 dresses, for surely they can).

Mrs. edaddy went with a long, off-white 1940's evening gown look that accentuated her 6'1" Barbie-like proportions. That was in the 90's, but she would have fit right into one of Gerard's favorite sultry night club scenes of an earlier era.

Oh, to be young again ...

My wife went the 2nd hand route, elr. It looked great, and we still have it in the attic for our equally frugal daughter.

Wedding dresses are one of the world's biggest ripoffs. They ratchet up the price by about 10 fold or more on clothing to begin with but these, its insane.

Actually my daughter wanted to wear my wife's beautiful dress that her older cousin wore. My daughter was a swimmer, extremely fit and very conscious of her figure. Couldn't get the dress on. My wife (and her cousin) were killers.

Snow camo...in Ayn Rand's novel We the Living, the protagonist (Kira) uses her mother's wedding dress for that purpose in her attempted escape from the Soviet Union.

Paid $350 for a custom-made dress for our wedding in 2012. My DH's suit cost more than my dress. In our fifties, first marriage for us both. No bridal scam for us!

How many women would get married if they didn't get to have the princess extravaganza? They want the wedding, not necessarily the husband.

It is better to love a woman and be disappointed
than to eat your soup alone.

I've done both, and I'll go with the love.

My wife wore what looked like an expensive wedding dress at ours 58 years ago (her Dad paid for it, so I have no idea what it cost). Haven't seen it since. She may have it stashed back somewhere, but if so, I don't know where. We have never been ones to look back. Still planning for the future, just not so far into the future as in earlier years.

I call shenanigans on the pic. This fellow looks to be in his late 30's or early 40's. That would mean that the bride he chose some 10 or 20 years earlier was of such substantial girth that the dress she wore on her wedding day would fit on him so many years later. Not likely, by my estimation.

JWM

why ex-wife's dress? If I used her dress for winter hunting, my bride for life would have a lot of respect

I was married in the early 80's. My dress was less than $50.00 and was absolutely suitable. I didn't love it particularly and I didn't "feel beautiful" in the dress, though 30 years later I can see that I was beautiful~ even in that dress. I'm still married to the same man and he's the one who loved my dress. As is traditional on my side of the family "stuff" is not considered sacred. That dress is long gone, parts of it abused (!) as costumes for our children. It's a killer to see what some people will spend on a dress, on what is essentially a recyclable item in the truest, most old-fashioned version of recyclable. A wedding dress can become a curtain and no one will be harmed.