What to do with your wedding dress after your wedding?

If you are planning your wedding, one of the major decisions and major purchases is that of your wedding dress. With the average wedding costing £24,000 according to Brides Magazine and the average wedding dress costing just shy of £2,000, your wedding dress is an expensive purchase seeing as you are only going to wear it once. Whilst the majority of brides simply opt to keep their wedding dress and tuck it away at the back of the wardrobe, there are some more useful, creative and cost effective ways of doing something with your wedding dress.

Keep it to pass on

If you have children or plan to have them in the future, then it can be a really good idea to keep your wedding dress to pass on for their wedding day. Of course, your beautiful and stylish wedding dress that looks fab today will almost certainly be incredibly old fashioned and unstylish in 20 years time but a talented seamstress or designer could soon make it look modern and make it a great looking and modern dress.

Sell your dress

With some wedding dresses costing thousands of pounds, it can be a very savvy idea to try and recoup some of this investment and put it toward you and your partner’s future life together. Whilst you’re not going to get anywhere near the price you paid, the money you could get could help go towards the deposit for a house, a nice holiday or renovating your property. Many people think that is a much more productive thing to do with their dress than simply leave it in the wardrobe gathering dust. Potential places to sell your wedding dress include EBay, Shpock and Gumtree as well as a range of more local websites and publications.

Rework your dress

There’s no law to say that you can’t wear your wedding dress after your wedding but you will probably want to rework it some way as you may look a little odd wearing a full blown wedding dress on a normal day. You may want to turn your wedding dress into an evening dress, cocktail dress or something else and if you don’t have the skill yourself then there are plenty of dressmakers and seamstresses who will be able to help. Or why not make it into a keepsake, like a pillow.

Give your dress away

Not everyone can afford a brand new wedding dress so you could do your little bit to make someone else’s dreams come true by giving it away. Maybe you know someone or have a relative who would appreciate it or you could simply give it to a charity shop, safe in the knowledge that not only will someone get to enjoy your dress but the money raised will go towards the aims of the charity involved. There are also a number of charities that specialise in old wedding dresses such as the Wedding Wishing Well Foundation. This charity collects wedding dresses to be used by terminally ill people who wish to marry before they die and any that can’t be used like that are sold with 100% of the funds going back into the charity to give terminally ill people the wedding they deserve.