Keeping Your Wedding Dress as Good as New

The most important thing when preserving a wedding dress is to make sure that you have your dress cleaned as soon as possible after the wedding. You need to remember that stains will set the longer that they are there. Even if you didn’t spill anything on your dress there are other stains that will make a difference with age. You cannot forget things like dirt on the bottom of the hem, or perspiration, or body oils. There is not a wedding dress that can be free from proper cleaning when it comes to preservation. Make sure that you pick a dry cleaner that specializes in wedding gowns. Proper and precise cleaning is important especially if there are details in the gown such as covered buttons, lace, or sequins. 

You need to pick a cleaning service that has a good reputation as well. If the solution is not changed at a dry cleaners the white of your dress could end up with a yellow tint and it will be hard to get it looking crisp even after more cleaning. Do your research and ask friends and family who they used to clean their dresses. Ask if you can take a look at the cleaning service’s dresses that they have in the store, particularly white clothing that they have cleaned. You may even want to do a trial run first with a white shirt that you or your husband owns. The cost to have a dress cleaned and packed can be anywhere from $100 to $600 depending on the size of the dress, the fabric, and the detailing that is involved.

The next thing that you want to do to preserve your wedding gown is to wrap the gown carefully in plastic. You can get the plastic from the dry cleaners and they will have larger plastic bags especially for wedding gowns. If your wedding gown came in a cardboard box, you don’t want to place the gown directly in the cardboard without the plastic. The cardboard can cause the gown to deteriorate fast or it can leave shaping problems that cannot be fixed if the gown is going to possibly be worn again. You should pack acid free tissue around all of the natural folds of the dress so that wrinkles will not set into the dress. 

If you are having a dry cleaners pack the dress for you, make sure to inspect the dress in the store. Make sure that you cannot see any stains, and that the dress has been properly put into the box with the plastic in place. If your dress has any sort of inserts such as shoulder pads, you should remove them before you store the dress. Inserts are typically made from foam, and the foam does not stand the test of time. When the foam deteriorates over time, it will destroy the fabric that it is next to.

The last thing that you should do in order to properly preserve your wedding gown is to find a great place to store it. Many people will hang their dress in the closet, and for proper preservation, this is not acceptable. You should also not store your gown in a hot attic or a basement where temperatures will greatly vary. A great place to store your gown would be under a bed or possibly in a shelf of a closet where it can lay vertically. Also, you don’t want to seal the plastic or the box completely. The material of your gown is going to need air circulation to survive through years and years of storage. 

Preserving your wedding dress is effort and it will take some money in order to do it right. When you are buying your dress, and you know ahead of time that you are going to want to preserve it, you may want to factor in cleaning costs so that you can save yourself stress later on. A wedding dress that is simple and traditional can stand the test of time through various styles and varying trends. Make sure to put the effort into your dress that you will want to get out of it later.