A file photo showing a bride on her wedding day. More women are opting to repurpose their mothers' bridal gown instead of getting a new one. Photo: stocksnap.io
After Dacia Di Gerolamo’s boyfriend, Evan Toth, proposed to her on Valentine’s Day 2023, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, after saying yes: Try on her mother’s wedding dress, which had been carefully stored in the family’s garage for nearly 30 years.
“When we unboxed it, we were really unsure,” said Di Gerolamo-Toth, as she is now known.
She had seen other unboxing videos on social media and knew that sometimes long-stored gowns didn’t hold up. But the dress, an ivory-gold satin confection with an enormous, detachable tulle train, that her mother, Leis Di Gerolamo, wore in 1994, was not only in perfect condition – it was, to Di Gerolamo-Toth’s shock, a “perfect fit”.
Di Gerolamo-Toth, a 32-year-old senior manager of new business development who lives in Arcadia, California, wanted to wear white on her wedding day, so she asked Cindy Ayvar, a designer in nearby Burbank, to give the dress a new life as her rehearsal dinner dress.
Ayvar worked to modernise the 1990s dress by shortening it, raising the waistline and adjusting the sleeves to make it work with the bride’s petite frame.
“She needed to be the one that walks the dress, not the dress walking her,” Ayvar said.
More brides have been upcycling their mothers’ wedding dresses for rehearsal dinners, receptions, elopements or the ceremony itself.
Motivating factors include sustainability, sentimentality and, of course, social media, where brides document the before, during and after.
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Some brides, like Di Gerolamo-Toth, surprise their mothers with the final result (on Facebook, a video of a bride surprising her mother by walking down the aisle during her rehearsal has over a million “likes”).
Grace Stewart, a founder of Unbox the Dress, which specialises in transforming dresses, said she’s witnessed the trend of brides wearing their mothers’ upcycled wedding dresses grow exponentially over the past several years.
When Tarreyn Van Slyke, 37, got married, she wanted to find an authentic way to incorporate her mother, Ellen Burke Van Slyke, into her wedding.
About three months before she married Ben Morse, 40, in the Franklin Village neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the social media consultant and content creator said she was really missing her mother, who died in 2017 from ovarian cancer at age 64.
“Losing a parent is awful, and planning a wedding without your mom is awful,” she said.
She knew she wanted her mother, whom she described as the “life of the party”, to be commemorated, “but not in a kind of ‘in memoriam’ way”.
“My parents were wild young artists in love in the 80s, and they met and were married within six months, and they had this iconic wedding that people still talk about today, almost 40 years later,” she said.
“They famously were the last wedding that venue allowed because it was so rock-n-roll.”
On Van Slyke’s wedding day in September 2023, about an hour before the end of the reception, someone queued up the very record her parents played at their wedding – a white vinyl edition of Billy Idol’s White Wedding.
Read more: Elegant gowns with a focus on romance seen at New York Bridal Fashion Week
“I ran onto the dance floor and surprised everyone,” Van Slyke said.
“Everyone knew it was my mom’s dress. I have this most cherished memory of holding my dad’s hand in one hand and my husband’s hand in the other, and being surrounded by all of my mom’s siblings and my godfather and just everyone was sobbing and dancing and singing.”
For Di Gerolamo-Toth, too, the opportunity for her family – and guests who had been at her parents’ wedding – to see her mother’s dress get a second life was a highlight of the experience.
“The two cousins that I’m closest with were actually old enough to remember, as little girls, seeing the dress on my mom,” she said.
It was incredibly moving, she added, “To see that come full circle.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
