I had to cancel my £21k wedding but I don't know what to do with the dress

Telegraph

a day ago

As I unzip the garment bag that has been keeping my wedding dress hidden from view for five years, I await the rush of emotion I expect its unshrouding to provoke in me.
Inside, the dress hangs, ghostly and still, suspended in time, the opposite of Miss Havisham's. The beads, intricately sewn onto the delicate fabric, catch my eye as I reach inside to touch the gown I chose back in December 2018, freshly engaged and drunk on the prospect of the white wedding we'd planned for summer 2020.
The bag falls away, landing in a soft heap on the floor, and the dress, perfectly preserved, is revealed in all its glittering glory, for the first time in half a decade.
While most wedding dresses, five years on from their big days, divulge telltale signs of a party well partied – a rip, a stain, a train trampled with mud – mine has none of that. It appears to be as it always was: untouched, unseen, unworn.
The perfect dress for my dream wedding
Stuart and I met in 2016 at a housewarming party and, a year and half later, I moved from London to live with him in his house in Cambridge. We got engaged later that year.
Life – or, more accurately, a global pandemic – got in the way of our wedding. I last tried on my dress – a £1,300 gown bought from a small bridal shop in Cambridge the day after we got engaged (I was overexcited) – in February 2020.
I had planned to collect it from the dress shop that May to take it to a seamstress for alterations: it needed taking up, delicate work that the shop itself couldn't do. That never happened.
Instead, in March 2020, we were forced to postpone the wedding – a £21,000 DIY affair with a marquee in a field, a barbecue, and a band – until the following summer.
Then, nearly a year later, we cancelled it altogether when life really did get in the way and I fell pregnant with our first child: nothing sharpens the mind or the available budget quite like an impending baby.
But, while my life moved on – we bought a house together in a village just outside Cambridge; had a baby, Fabian, in November 2021; and then a second, Inigo, in May 2024 – my dress didn't.
It stayed secreted away in its bag like an unkissed bride behind a veil at the dress shop – scene of its giddy purchase – for two years and then in a wardrobe at my sister's house for a further three after the boutique owner begged me to collect it.
I felt unable to have it – this pretty, precious thing – in my house, a home now full of dirty nappies and smears of crusted Weetabix. The two chapters of my life – the wedding that wasn't and the motherhood that is now viscerally real – felt so profoundly at odds that it was hard to compute they both belonged to me.
Sometimes, deep in the trenches of mothering, I longed to be a bride again: carefree, romantic, naive. And then my son would slip his tiny, sticky hand into mine and I'd pity the girl who thought her wedding dress had to be perfect.
The woman I am, five years on
Inevitably, the half-decade in storage has imbued the dress with a weighty significance: it's a shimmering embodiment of the person I used to be; an almost mystical artefact from a life I no longer lead.
The person who bought this dress still lived in her partner's house; had left journalism behind – she thought forever – to pursue a teaching career; could go out dancing on a whim (and tolerate the hangover that followed); and had never, ever changed a nappy.
While I have largely ignored the dress for five years, the memory of it – almost ethereal – has burrowed its way into my subconscious mind, its beauty jarring with the chaos of my life five years on.
I don't know what made me want to look at it again; when curiosity finally trumped the fear I might burst into tears upon seeing it, the physical release of emotions that have been in storage for as long as the dress. Perhaps it was the birth of my second baby a year ago, a further stretching of the now taut line between my former and current selves. Perhaps it was the growing sense of guilt about the dress taking up space in my sister's wardrobe, a maid of honour duty she performed gladly but didn't sign up for. Perhaps it was simply because wedding season was coming down the aisle.
We choose a Monday, when the children are in childcare, and my sister treats the moment with the reverence it deserves, hanging the dress, cloaked in its covering, on the back of her wardrobe.
She speaks in hushed tones, like a doctor breaking bad news. I'm grateful she's taking it seriously, this slightly frivolous reopening of the past. Taking the dress out of its bag, I note, with surprise, the emotional paralysis I feel upon seeing it: not sad, not happy, just nothingness.
The dress feels both familiar and foreign, like an ex-partner I once loved but haven't seen for years. It is, objectively, beautiful; its intricate beading, the cut of its bodice, the buttons that snake sensuously down its back. As I trace a finger down these buttons, the numbness begins to dissipate and I observe the tangle of emotions – joy, anger, excitement, grief – now woven into the gown. It's both special and not; both my wedding dress and not.
My first dress – and my second
Because we did have a wedding, in the end: a simple ceremony 16 months after the birth of our first son with close friends only and a party at a pub. It cost us just £850 all in. And I chose another dress to wear for that day, deeming my original too bridal for the occasion.
My first dress was – still is, of course – traditional: the colour of champagne with a demure neckline, delicate embellishments and a train that puddled prettily on the floor. It was also a tiny size six.
My second dress, meanwhile, was crimson, low-cut and aggressively sequinned with a slit from floor to upper-thigh. It – a size 12, incidentally – was vibrant and bold and, I think, spoke of the life lived in the years since choosing the first gown.
If my first dress was virginal, my second screamed the opposite: it was the colour of life, of longing and of a mother newly blooded. It was also rented: with one dress already in storage, I chose an outfit I could send back. It cost me £85.
Back in the room, my sister – doing a job she's waited more than half a decade to do – helps me into the dress. Only half the buttons do up. As I gaze at my reflection in the mirror, I realise the dress is ill-fitting in more ways than one. It doesn't fit my body any more but nor, I see, does it fit me. The me that prefers secondhand to brand new, favours an oversized silhouette to a figure-hugging one, and is too time-poor, exhausted and overstimulated to faff around with that many tiny buttons. I have changed, forever altered by the last five years, while the dress, which never made it to its alterations, has not.
I take the dress off, place it back on its hanger. As I do so, I notice a seam at one shoulder has come apart, a small rip in the tulle that frays at the edges. Was it always like this? Is this one of the alterations I was hoping the seamstress might fix? I reach into the dark recesses of my brain but I can't remember: that information has been wiped and replaced with the correct Calpol dosage for a one-year-old. Maybe, I ponder, it's a new tear, evidence that, in fact, my dress was not frozen in time but aged with me inside the closet. Either way, I rather like this flaw. Marriage, after all, isn't about one perfect day in one perfect dress. Like delicate fabric, it can snag when put under pressure and be repaired with love and attention. And mending, of course, is how you make things stronger.
What to do: sell, donate or keep?
I take the dress home: it's time. What comes next, I don't know. Beautiful as it is, the frock rubs up awkwardly against my new life – my now life – a reality made flesh when, in order to get it home, I have to drape it across two children's car seats, both of them infested with toy cars, dried orange peel and breadstick crumbs. I have three options: sell, donate or keep. A scan of resale sites tells me wedding dresses, like cars, depreciate in value as soon as they're taken off the bridal forecourt: even ones that are only test driven, it seems, don't sell for anywhere near retail value. Meanwhile, the allure of donating the dress is appealing, in line as it is with the sustainable values that have sprouted in me over the last five years; a way of offsetting, perhaps, the fact I didn't choose a preloved dress in the first place.
Keeping it would be a ludicrous choice, of course. The dress is awkward to store and of little – nay, no – use to me: I have sons and, if I did have a daughter, I'd never expect her to wear a dress even I didn't don. But, when I finally get it home, I spot an inscription written in cursive on the garment bag: ' When I fall in love it will be forever... ' A cloying epigraph designed to woo brides-to-be, sure. But I did fall in love, in a bridal boutique days before Christmas 2018, and, well, till death do us part.