How More Brides Are Upcycling Their Mothers’ Wedding Dresses

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 Ms. 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 Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth’s shock, a “perfect fit.”

Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth, a 32-year-old senior manager of new business development who lives in Arcadia, Calif., wanted to wear white on her wedding day, so she asked Cindy Ayvar, a designer in Burbank, to give the dress a new life as her rehearsal dinner dress.

Ms. Ayvar worked to modernize the ’90s 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,” Ms. Ayvar said.

More brides have been upcycling their mother’s 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. Some brides, like Ms. 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 specializes in transforming dresses, said she’s witnessed the trend of brides wearing their mothers’ “upcycled” wedding dresses grow exponentially over the past several years.

It was Carrie Cook’s idea to have her 1988 wedding dress revamped so that her daughter Charlotte Platt, 31, could wear it during her wedding weekend in September 2024. “It occurred to me, ‘this thing’s never going to see the light of day,’” said Ms. Cook, a marketing and media specialist who had been married for 35 years when her daughter got engaged.

The idea was especially appealing to Ms. Platt, a marketing and growth contractor who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., for its sustainability. “With weddings in general, there’s a lot of waste,” Ms. Platt said.

With the help of Claudia DeSouza-Baptista of Bushwood Tailors Opportunity Shop in New Bedford, Mass., the gown became a pantsuit. “We definitely knew we were going to lose the Lady Di ballroom effect,” Ms. Cook said with a laugh. “I loved it in the ’80s, but when you look back at ’80s fashion, it’s just such a shame that was our prime because nobody looked good!”

In the end, Ms. Platt said, “I liked that outfit more than my wedding dress.”

Kasey Inez, 26, always knew what she wanted to wear as a bride. Growing up, she often pored over her parents’ 1991 wedding album. “I had always seen the dress and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks so beautiful,’” she said. “‘That’s what I want to wear.’”

But when Ms. Inez, an actress who lives in Apple Valley, Calif., tried it on ahead of her October wedding, the hefty shoulder pads and mesh detailing on the “very ’90s” dress gave her pause. She found Jocelyn A. Dungca, a tailor in Los Angeles, who changed some key details and turned the gown into a dress she loved.

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 neighborhood 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 the age of 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.”

To do something that felt more befitting of her mother’s free spirit, “I was like, oh, her dress!” Ms. Van Slyke said the champagne satin wedding gown from the 1940s that her mother found in a thrift shop for less than $100 had been a source of fascination for as long as she can remember. “My whole childhood, my mom’s wedding dress was in this magical box on her shelf, wrapped in blue paper, and I would ask her to take it out,” she said.

Ms. Van Slyke was already working with the Los Angeles-based designer Tashina Hunter, who specializes in custom wedding gowns made from new and repurposed materials, for her ceremony dress. Before handing Ms. Hunter her mother’s dress, Ms. Van Slyke paused. “Is this sacrilege to cut up this vintage satin?”

But then she channeled her mother: “I could break something as a kid and she was always like, ‘Things break!’ She was a use-the-china-every-day kind of person. And so I could hear her saying, ‘Cut it up. It’s had two weddings already. It’s covered in grass stains!’”

On her 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.”

“I ran onto the dance floor and surprised everyone,” Ms. 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 Ms. 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.”