My grandmother claimed that she threw away my mother’s wedding dress decades ago. Tossed it out with the trash like a moth-eaten jumper. Why would she keep it? The occasion it was made for was hardly a happily ever after affair. The photographs of the day in 1990 look pretty, the bride and groom seem loved up, but just five years later the marriage was over, my parents were divorced and the “till death do us part” proved to be less a vow than a promise with fingers crossed.
For my grandmother’s generation, divorce was a dirty word, a bit of an embarrassment, and she would tell me, even as a child, that she hated my father because of it. To be fair to her, there is no way to spin the story where my dad doesn’t come off like the bad guy — having an affair and leaving your wife with a toddler (me) and a baby (my brother, Alasdair) is a tricky beginning plot for any hero-redemption arc. So it was no surprise my grandmother didn’t keep the dress that symbolised a future she hoped for her daughter that never materialised. But after she died in 2008, tucked away at the back of her wardrobe, there it was — my mother’s dress.
The dress has now been sitting in a box under my stairs for a number of years. I’ve only worn it once: just a few weeks into living together I answered the door to my partner like Miss Havisham. I’ve considered wearing it for Halloween as a corpse bride or bride of Chucky, but it doesn’t feel right to ruin an item that held so much significance. And I’ve thought about just getting it taken in to fit me properly, but it’s hardly an outfit you can casually wear to someone else’s event.
A few months ago, though, I got engaged and now my partner and I are planning our own wedding, so I’ve been thinking more and more about that dress and about my parents’ marriage. Lots of soon-to-be brides will go through a similar process of their mums pulling out their own gowns, having preserved them for years and years, only for their daughters to stare at the unboxed frocks, decades out of style, and wonder, what the hell do I do with that?
Lately there’s been a growing trend in brides turning their mothers’ old dresses into their “second look” of the wedding — often this involves shortening the dress or removing the puffy sleeves and having a sentimental mini to dance the night away in on your big day. I thought about this option, but I wasn’t sure it had the same nostalgic feel to wear a dress from a failed marriage, from a night that ended up causing so much pain. When people post photos of themselves in these hand-me-down dresses they often share captions about hoping their marriage will be half as blessed as their parents’, or referring to the dress as lucky — but I have nothing to learn from a marriage I can’t even remember.
In fact I hope it won’t affect my own marriage, since some statistics suggest that children of divorced parents are more likely than those from “intact families” to find themselves heading for divorce. I had a relative congratulate me on my engagement followed by a “I hope it doesn’t have the Gill curse” — a reference to the fact that almost every marriage on my father’s side of the family has involved at least one divorce. When I spoke to a stylish friend about the dress, asking for advice on what to do, she told me to burn it in a big ceremony to free me from the dress’s bad luck.
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Having never been superstitious, I decided to do something more practical with the dress. When I tried it on again I was surprised by how not terrible it is — it feels more like cosplay for some Pride and Prejudice event than a wedding dress, and the details are beautiful. Luckily for me my aunt Sophie Hale is an incredible designer and made the original dress. So I visited her studio, where alongside her seamster, Mamad, we brainstormed possible updates. The first question: should we dye it a different colour, since the difficulty with a white dress is no matter how much you switch it up you can’t wear it to anyone else’s wedding? We discussed shortening the skirt to make it knee-length, splitting it into a maxiskirt and top, or maybe a miniskirt with a vest. But none of it felt right and I wondered if I was making a mistake.
Even though my parents divorced, I only have one negative memory caused by it — I was told to stand up in class so that a teacher could explain what divorce meant. She clarified to my peers it meant my mum and dad didn’t love each other like normal parents, but hated one another and it was probably very difficult for me. They all chanted, “Poor Flora.” I can still picture the shock and pity on their faces.
There’s often a moment in a wedding speech where parents pass on their lessons of love learnt from their marriage, yet I’ve been with my partner for twice as long as my parents were actually married. But just because they weren’t together, it doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything from their relationship. The reason that day when my teacher made me stand was so upsetting was because it felt so untrue — I’d only ever witnessed love between my parents. I never saw them argue or fight, and despite his actions towards her, my mother had a rule only to praise our father in front of us, believing our relationship with him was more important than any animosity she felt.
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And while it might have started as an act, it became the truth — they became friends. On top of that I saw them both dote on and love other people in their separate lives. Gwyneth Paltrow was mercilessly bullied for calling her divorce a “conscious uncoupling”, but on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, she explained, “The most common wound that I heard from children of divorce was ‘my parents couldn’t be in the same room and couldn’t be friends’,” and she wanted to avoid this for her own children.
Your parents don’t have to be married for you to learn from them the makings of a healthy relationship. The love I saw from and between my divorced parents was happier and healthier than many of my friends witnessed from inside their own “intact homes”. So I refuse to believe that I’ve inherited the “Gill curse” or that my dress is jinxed — and I finally decided to give it a transformation worthy of my mum, who turned an upsetting event into a happy, confident life. With my aunt I decided to upcycle the formal dress into a pair of trousers and a top — not for my wedding, but for any time I want to channel my mother’s strength.
What did you do with your wedding outfit? Tell us in the comments below.
