This bride upcycled EIGHT dresses for her wedding

It can be truly meaningful and lovely when a bride wears a wedding gown passed down to her from a mother or grandmother. It’s also pretty cool when she’s able to transform it into something better suited to today’s style.

One bride in Corpus Christi, Texas, managed to take things one step further by incorporating the dresses of eight women in her family into her own wedding gown and accessories for her bridal party in June.

“It was so nice. It made that day that much more sentimental for me,” Tammy Hench Rakowitz told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Rakowitz’s aunt, Rosemary Miller, and mother, Jan Hench, helped her sew the dress, patterned after the gown that Jan wore to her 1972 wedding. She used some of the lace from Jan’s gown and wore her mother’s train and headpiece. That was just part of this massive gown recycling project.

Lace from her great-great-grandmother’s 1860 gown, her grandmother’s 1940 gown, and her mother-in-law’s 1967 gown made up Tammy’s garter. Lace from her godmother’s headpiece accented her bouquet.

Then came the bridal party: The bridesmaids wore shawlets fashioned from Rosemary’s 1965 wedding dress and Rosemary’s mother-in-law’s gown, adorned with bows taken from the gown of another of Tammy’s aunts.

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Tammy’s niece was a junior bridesmaid and wore a jacket repurposed from the lace bodice of her great-grandmother’s wedding gown. The flower girls’ dresses used materials from Tammy’s mother, aunt, and mother-in-law as well.

The littlest member of the party, the baby daughter of the bride and groom, wore her great-grandmother’s 1914 baptismal gown.

“It was so rewarding to see all the materials being used on that dress,” Tammy said. “It didn’t feel weird to pull apart the dresses. I’ve wanted to give the dresses to museums, but they would not take them.”

It’s pretty remarkable that all of these gowns had been preserved well enough to be reused like this. Carissa Suter, who remakes old gowns at her store in Virginia, told YahooStyle in 2016 that dry rot can make the material of vintage gowns impossible to work with.

“If the fabric is so old that if there’s any pressure put on the seams, the thread or the fabric rips, then it’s a no-go,” Carissa said.

But if the gown is carefully preserved, this kind of redesign is a beautiful way to honour the generations that came before you while still making it your own.

Tammy knew her process was something special, even giving her wedding guests a booklet that described all the dresses and their reincarnations.

“Everyone liked the history and what it took to pull it together,” she said.

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