Bridal dress care: how to look after your beautiful dress

Soon after choosing your bridal dress, you might start worrying about how to keep it pristine in the run-up to your wedding day — and on the day itself.

In fact, you might start to feel uncomfortable at the idea of anyone coming within ten feet of you once you’ve put it on. Or 20 feet if they're holding a glass of red wine. You might even start thinking about banning wine from the wedding altogether and replacing it with tap water.

But don’t worry. Here is our guide to looking after your wedding dress, both before and during your wedding day.

Tip top bridal dress care

In most cases, you’ll collect your wedding dress from us four or five months before your wedding day. About eight weeks before the day, you’ll visit a dressmaker for alterations. (We have one we trust completely and wholeheartedly recommend.) Then you’ll be keeping it at home until two or three days before your wedding, when you’ll have your final fitting and any necessary last-minute alterations.

In other words, your bridal dress will be in your care for quite a while before you finally get to wear it and show it off on the big day. And you’ll be moving it about a little bit.

That might make you a little anxious. Don’t be.

Transporting and storing a wedding dress is very simple. It will come in a full-length, breathable bag. The only time it should come out of the bag is when you are having alterations done and when you are putting it on on your wedding day.

Apart from that, it should stay in the bag and placed in a wardrobe where it is protected and can hang down freely. But make sure it isn’t stuffed in between lots of other clothes, like heavy coats.

If you’re travelling and the dress bag needs to be folded over for a period of time during transit, simply take the dress out of its bag when you get to your destination and hang it up, say off the top of a door. If it has a train, let that hang down too. Just make sure you don’t do this somewhere that gets a lot of footfall. Or where a child with a chocolate bar has easy access to it.

If you want to be on the safe side, you can place a duvet or a sheet over the dress. (Or just don’t give the child a chocolate bar.)

Generally speaking, you don’t need to take the dress out of the bag periodically to air it. Remember, it comes in a breathable bag.

Avoid… (Image by StockSnap from Pixabay)

Handling your bridal dress

Some people (mums especially) buy a pair of white gloves with which to handle the dress. In fact, we once had an entire bridal party wearing white gloves come into the wedding shop. That’s incredibly considerate, but you don’t need to go that far to protect your wedding dress.

All you need to do is make sure your hands are clean and grease free. We wash our hands before we handle any of our dresses, and always make sure we do so before every appointment with our brides. If you and anyone else who will be handling your dress does the same, your dress will be fine.

And it’s not just the skin on your hands you need to be aware of.

For example, when you are trying on your dress for fittings and alterations, don’t, whatever you do, do so having just been for a spray tan. It might sound like we wouldn’t need to say that, but you would be surprised. We even had to send a bride-to-be away once because she had booked a spray tan session right just before her appointment with us.

Hidden traps and dangers

Many threats to your dress are hiding in plain site.

Beading on shoes can wreak havoc on a bridal dress hemline, catching on the edge and potentially snagging it. Necklaces and bracelets can be equally destructive. Chiffon is particularly vulnerable to irregular edges on wedding jewelry.

Then there is the big one. The least obvious, and therefore the most dangerous, of all the hidden threats. Omnipresent, yet rarely seen. Innocent to the eye, yet devastating. You won’t see it coming until it’s too late. Until it has left its silent mark… The ballpoint pen.

When you visit our bridal boutique, you’ll notice we don’t use pens out on the shop floor. Far too dangerous. Before you know it, you’ve accidentally drawn a deep blue or black line across a pristine wedding dress. A casual gesture of the hand while talking is all it takes.

Also avoid… (Image by Kati from Pixabay)

What to do when disaster strikes your wedding dress

So what do you do if misfortune befalls your bridal dress?

The most important thing of all is not to panic or do anything in haste.

Be prepared and have a dry white face cloth to hand at all times. You can use that, in the first instance, to dab off any marks, even make-up.

If that doesn’t work, you can escalate things: a cotton bud in warm soapy water. Don’t over-wet the bud, and go gently and slowly. Try multiple, subtle passes rather than attempting to go in hard and get the stain out in one go.

Do not, whatever you do, use a baby wipe or something similar to tackle a stain on your dress. Baby wipes are for a baby’s bottom, which is, trust us, nowhere near as delicate as the fabric of your wedding dress.

Case in point, if a baby gets a ballpoint pen ink on it, you can simply rub it off. You can’t do that with a wedding dress.

So what can you do if disaster strikes with a pen?

Well, we’ll tell you what we do, but you didn’t hear it from us. And if you try it and it goes wrong, then we’ll remind you of this disclaimer: do not try this at home, we are professionals.

Put a little hairspray on the ink mark.

Or a colourless perfume.

Both of these will evaporate out the ink stain. We’ve seen it done. It’s like magic. We’ve done it ourselves. It can be a lifesaver in an emergency. But, like we said, we won’t stand over the results if you try it yourself. (Also, to be clear, we’re talking about ballpoint pen ink stains on wedding dresses here, not on babies.)

What’s the worst that could happen?

(Image by Kaur Reinjärv from Pixabay)

We’ve heard some stories.

Pints of Guinness spilled over a bride. Gravy dropped all down her front. You’re not getting either of those out with warm water and a cotton bud.

But perhaps the best story we know of disaster befalling a bridal dress is one we were involved with ourselves — though it wasn’t one of our brides.

There used to be a wooden footbridge across the shallow, narrow river by the Jameson distillery here in Midleton. It had gotten into pretty bad shape when a couple and their wedding party went there for photographs about 15 years ago.

The photographer asked everyone to assemble on the bridge for a group picture.

The bridge couldn’t hold the weight of the group and it collapsed. Some of the bridal party managed to jump ashore untouched. Most didn’t. They tumbled into the river and quickly sank knee deep into the foul, dark, muddy river bed. By the time everyone got out, they looked a mess, and were in no condition to go to the wedding reception.

Although the bride wasn’t one of ours, we were the closest bridal dress boutique. The girls arrived en masse and en mess, just as we were locking up, hoping we could help.

So we did. While the men were sorted out by Coakley’s Menswear in Midleton, we found a new wedding dress for the bride.

Ordinarily, it would have been very difficult to provide a bride we had never met before with a perfectly fitting bridal gown. But, and sometimes you do think things happen for a reason, we happened to have a short dress that had turned out to be wrong for the bride who had ordered it. Astonishing, it fit the unfortunate bridge bride perfectly. And we mean perfectly. Like she was born into it.

Meanwhile, others helped out too: Regina Connelly, a beautician, arrived to redo the bride’s hair and make up. The distillery let everyone shower off and get clean. Bohane’s Dry Cleaners took care of the groom’s suit within an hour. Midleton at its absolute finest.

That’s an extreme example, though. Most weddings pass off without a hitch and most wedding dresses come out the other side looking as stunning as they went in. Yours will too. And for the minor mishaps: go gently and you’ll find most stains will come out.