Can You Wear Your Bridesmaid Dresses After the Wedding
Weddings are a huge thing in anybody’s life. The preparations themselves can be hellish, but when the day comes around it’s undoubtedly worth it. While beautiful, these occasions can also be extremely pricey. One of the reasons for the pricey nature is the sheer cost of items involved and said items being used once before getting tossed away. This also extends to bridesmaid dresses.
These pieces of clothing are beautiful but cursed to be difficult to wear outside of weddings themselves. This stems from their style over function design, and as such we can often see them take up space within our wardrobes. While one of the ways to get at least some money back is to sell them, you could also make sure they are reusable and better suited for situations outside of the wedding. All you need to do is engage in some of the following steps.
Communicate with the bride
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The best way to ensure your bridesmaid dress is fitting for repurposing is to talk about the choice of dress with the bride. The bride may have more extravagant ideas and wishes from bridesmaid dresses aiming more for glamour than functionality. While such dresses can make for some impressive wedding pictures, their usefulness outside of that wedding is almost none.
You and the other bridesmaids should work with the bride to pick bridesmaid dresses that will look great during the wedding, either by following its theme or just being pretty, and still be formal enough to use after the fact. You could look for some ideas online and even use them as a market for your future bridesmaid dresses. Keep in mind that having a more unified vision between the bridesmaids on how the dress should look will result in a much easier time when it comes to picking one.
Make sure the color and style choices are close enough to bride’s original wishes while taking detect the less commonly wearable aspects of the dress and discussing them. While everybody has their perfect wedding in mind, things like bridesmaid dresses are usually topics open for discussion rather than somebody’s firmly chosen demand. Altering the dress code for bridesmaids shouldn’t affect the whole proceedings by much, especially if you and the other bridesmaids are being modest with the changes.
However, it’s not impossible to bump into an inflexible bride who is dead set on the clothing choice. If this situation happens to you consider taking on some of the following advice instead.
Adjusting the dress
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The best thing about clothes is that they can easily be adjusted to one’s desires. No matter whether it’s a simple matter of fitting your size or something more complex, tailors are always ready to answer the call. The first step when it comes to adjustments is to find a tailor you can trust with the dress.
Bridesmaid dresses are expensive so any off work the tailor does risks not only their usability but a lot of our money as well. This goes double for more elaborate adjustments. For example, if you wish to remove frills from a dress and switch them for a different design you won’t give your dress to just anybody. Even a single wrong cut could ruin the dress as the frilled part could be awfully difficult to remove without bits staying on it.
If the bride insisted on long dresses, remember that you can always shorten them. Cutting a dress down to knee-length or midi length is the usual way people make their dresses more casual and thus more compatible with formal but simpler events. Parties and dinners can be a perfect place to take our shortened dress.
Repurpose parts
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Sometimes, the bridesmaid dress is just not working outside of weddings. Not only that but it’s questionable whether it’ll even fit the next wedding or get left in the closet while we pursue the next dress that’s more fitting for the upcoming wedding. If time flies by and your dress is seeing no action it may be time to repurpose it.
Sadly, this will include tearing the dress apart so it could be tough to do for those who have a lot of sentimental value for the item, although those types of people most likely won’t consider this option regardless. Once the dress is cut, you can use the textile salvaged from it to create new bits of clothing. You don’t even have to cut the whole dress necessarily, shaving off sleeves or cutting a few layers off of it can turn the dress more casual while giving you some extra materials for the clothing ideas you had in mind.
Dye it
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The color of a clothing item is very important to its overall feel and function. Not every color fits every occasion so having the bridesmaid dresses be of a color that scarcely fits the events you usually go to makes finding occasions to wear it even harder. Thankfully, there’s a very basic and simple way in which we can make our clothes more neutral or associated with desired situations.
Dyeing is a go to solution for such circumstances as it changes the color without requiring compromisation of any part of the dress to be done. However, the choice of colors could be limited depending on your dress’ fabric. Make sure to educate yourself on available and harmless dyes for your dress before starting the process itself.
Accessorize
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One shouldn’t underestimate the difference a few simple accessories can make. Dresses can be enhanced with belts, scarves, jewelry that makes their style more pronounced, or brooches to create a whole new clothing item out of them.
The best way to understand how to properly accessorize is by experimenting. Open those jewelry boxes and equip all of your various trinkets. Try them in different combinations until finding one that fits the look you are trying to pull of.
With this, you’ve achieved a fresh and unique look that will give your bridesmaid dress a new purpose. The best part about accessorizing is that you can easily have a single piece of clothing fit multiple styles by switching accessories.
