For Sale: Wedding Dress, Worn Once

There’s an irritating coyness to the language around wedding expenses: they’re not expenses at all, they’re “investments.”

I was always thoroughly neutral on the concept of weddings. They sounded fun—music! Booze! Dancing with all your friends!—but not so fun that I spent a lot of time thinking about or imagining one beyond standard laundry-folding sessions in front of Say Yes to the Dress. Then I met Josh, and found myself utterly kneecapped by my love for him. I became the person squealing to my best friend five weeks into dating—five!—that I wanted to marry him. Thank God, the feeling was mutual, and eleven months later he dropped to one knee in the middle of a hike and I bawled before he could even finish his speech and he put his grandmother’s ring on my finger and we went out for chicken wings.

There is a certain meta-anxiety that can take hold when you are a woman planning a wedding. Layered on top of the mundane concerns about having enough chairs and having enough food and who is going to bring the ice, can someone please remember not to forget the ice is a fine sheen of performance anxiety. If I cared about something, was I caring too much, like a total basic? If I didn’t care about something, was I heartless and unsentimental, a feminist shrew? How could I not want to spend money on favors? How dare I force my bridesmaids into matching dresses? Was I ever going to play bride right?

Enter the wedding dress: expensive, embodied, symbolic of the patriarchy.

I wanted a white dress, and I was embarrassed about it. It seemed like all of my cool friends eschewed wedding white in favor of black or dark blue or something colorful and artsy because hello, it’s not like we have any purity to advertise here. But I liked the way white dresses looked, and I reasoned that while I could always wear fancy colorful dresses at some later juncture in life (accepting my National Book Award, say), this would really be the only socially acceptable context to go full white.

There’s an irritating coyness to the language around wedding-adjacent expenses: they’re not expenses at all, they’re investments, from the photographer to the venue to, yes, the dress. Initially, I wanted to economize. Something used—sorry, “pre-worn.” eBay, maybe. Thrift stores. A white bridesmaid’s dress that looked reasonable if you squinted.

Enter the wedding dress: expensive, embodied, symbolic of the patriarchy.

I tried on my mother’s dress, and traveling-pants-style, it fit perfectly (almost—I am too tall for most standard formalwear). The style was, for a gown from the 1980s, surprisingly unobjectionable: no cupcake sleeves or mohawk-style veil. It was what should have been fated, the only reason you even keep the dress around in the first place, and there in my parents’ kitchen I saw my mother hold her breath, just a little. I wanted that to be it; I wanted something about the very fibers of the lace and satin that my grandmother had stitched together to a perfect fit using her trusty beige Bernina to have some kind of generational magic that made me glow with certainty. But in the end, I knew—and I sort of hated that I knew, hated that this was something I had to decide based on this instinct I apparently had—I wanted a dress for my own.

My bridal salon experience could be summed up by paraphrasing Ariana Grande: I saw it, I liked it, I wanted it, I got it. My vision of myself—gag—was something with no actual frills, no “bling,” no sexy side slit or daringly low neckline. (We were getting married in a church, for Christ’s actual sake.) Somewhere in my googling I found Nicole Miller’s bridal line: safe, quote-unquote classy, and unlikely to make me cringe in forty years. The Abigail dress from that line was simple: floor-length, sleeveless, smooth, columnar, and twelve hundred dollars.

The sample size fit me perfectly. The salesladies gushed, in the way salesladies gush, and they upsold me to matching shapewear (which I immediately lost) and a veil (which I did not). My friend AK and I posed with the sign, both in all black with bluish sticking-up hair, because why the hell not? I handed over my credit card, charged away the entirety of my tax refund, and drank the crap out of my free champagne—mission accomplished, clink clink.

*

At some point, I jokingly began to refer to our wedding as “an expensive way to disappoint everyone I know.” Except it wasn’t really a joke at all, and I could barely have a sense of humor about it.

My choice of pre-ceremony music—bagpipes—was always bound to be controversial. (Some people were better than others at disguising their reflexive grimace when I brought this up.)

I wanted reply cards, because getting things in the mail is fun; my fiancé countered (not unreasonably) that they’d mean an awful lot more postage. He didn’t want to pay for a new suit; I strong-armed him by pointing out he’d rewear it.

My father and my mother were going to walk me down the aisle—equality, right? Or was any spin on that tradition implying that I was just a piece of property to be traded along with some choice livestock and a tract of land?

We were getting married in a church—with gender-inclusive language, and not in a “love, honor, and obey” way, surely disappointing some traditional relatives somewhere. But we were also getting married in a church. “I’m just not comfortable in churches,” a friend told me, assuring me that it wasn’t personal. I worried that I’d inadvertently made our wedding into some kind of passive-aggressive test: all my real friends are going to sit in the pew and listen to the Bible!

My socialist vegan friends would quite literally be rubbing elbows with police officers and known Republicans in the buffet line. “It’s okay,” a plant-based friend told me, in a tone of genuine reassurance, “we always bring a package of Jo-Jo’s in the car just in case we can’t eat the wedding food.” I doubled down on my pursuit of a secondary caterer to supply falafel.

At some point, I jokingly began to refer to our wedding as “an expensive way to disappoint everyone I know.” 

And then there was the dress. When a more God-fearing relative said “ooh, it’s sexy,” I angsted over whether that was supposed to be a compliment or a dig. When I asked my mom if she minded that I wasn’t wearing hers, she assured me—over and over—that she loved the dress, that it was my wedding . . . but I don’t think she ever quite met my eyes.

Throughout the nine months of planning, I agonized and fretted and cried in a Michael’s craft store while buying fake ivy for the seating chart because everyone, everywhere, was going to have a terrible time and whisper mean things behind their hands and judge me and only me, the bride, for daring to be a bride at all.

*

I don’t think people hated the wedding. In fact, I think everyone had fun. I did. Josh did. Now there was paperwork yoking us forever and a bunch of checks made out to the nonexistent “Mr. and Mrs. Josh Maxwell” to talk our bank into depositing.

Our wedding attire dutifully hung in our shared closet. Josh, as promised, wore his suit again. I, however, was not so lucky. My “investment” had zeroed out. No sensible financial planner would have encouraged it.

My no-nonsense side told me my dress was just a hunk of cloth that (as I did not intend to remarry) had no remaining material value for me—something to be dry-cleaned and packed in a garment bag and schlepped from our starter house to our family house to our active-adult-over-55 condo community until it was finally sold, smelling of mothballs, at an estate sale in the year 2080. There was the vague notion of passing it on to my daughter, but wasn’t I myself living proof that sometimes daughters think for themselves? (Not to mention that the mere thought of growing and raising a child to adulthood made me want to faint.)

I knew I could sell my dress, though. I’d browsed plenty of the used wedding dress websites myself. I’d also sold the odd piece of clothing online: blazers purchased in a fit of career aspiration, final-sale jeans that arrived too short. It’d be a little cash in my pocket in return for something I really, really did not need. But selling my wedding dress felt a little sad. Or craven. Or like an O. Henry-ish act of desperation I’d come to regret for the rest of my life.

I—we—didn’t strictly need the money, but we didn’t not need it, either. Including the cost of alterations, the dress was the most expensive item I’d ever bought, outstripping the previous title-holder (my MacBook) by a cool $850, and since I’d left my full-time job to write, I wasn’t in a position to turn down money. And yet I hesitated.

Even my website of choice, PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com, had an SEO-induced frankness to its name that squeezed any magic right out of it. Gone were the gauzy dressing rooms and the free champagne, swapped for a PayPal account and a brass-tacks attitude.

For sale: wedding dress, worn once.

I’ll just list it, I told myself. A $25 listing fee, no commitment. I didn’t have to say yes.

When I got my first message from Erica [not her actual name], I didn’t answer right away—I was traveling; I’d had a few nibbles go nowhere; it wasn’t exactly a priority. But the next time I checked my phone, there were two more messages: Did I get her first one? Sorry if she’s messaging too much. It’s just that she tried on this dress at the store and she loves it. Is it still available? Am I talking to anyone else? Could I let her know either way?

I knew I could sell my wedding dress. We didn’t strictly need the money, but we didn’t not need it, either.

I wrote her back. She replied almost instantly, explaining her search for a dress, her love for the elegance of the Abigail, the high price tag that kept from buying it at a salon. Suddenly, I was myself a year ago.

Could I take a close-up of the bodice? I could.

Could I knock $100 off the price? I could.

Could I ship it the next week?

It was only fibers, I reasoned, off-white shell and ivory lining (plus sewn-in cups, bustle ties, and some very faint sweat stains). It was an object I was ambivalent about and an object Erica was dying to own, to wear.

Absolutely, I told her.

Erica was ecstatic. She couldn’t wait. Her fiancé was going to take her to Texas Roadhouse to celebrate. My heart swelled—I was so happy for her.

I showed up to our small-town post office with my marshmallowy Nicole Miller garment bag and threw myself at the packing mercy of our postmaster. “Feels like I was just here with the invitations,” I said.

“Time flies,” he said.

Then we jammed the dress into a box designed for board games and it was out of my life forever.

Erica’s money paid for plane tickets. In June, my husband and I will fly to Ireland, to tour castles and villages and visit the place where his grandmother was born, years and years before she’d come to America and wear a diamond ring on her finger. And in July, Erica will walk down the aisle in a beautiful, twice-beloved dress. If those are the dividends of my investment, then I think I spent wisely.

Maybe, in the abstract, selling a wedding dress is sad. Just the way that, in the abstract, a wedding can be oppressive and uncomfortable and wide-open for judgment. But in the specifics, in my own actual personal life, I was happy to be married—I was happy at my wedding, even. And I was happy to sell my dress to this particular woman. I wanted her to have it, and I wanted it to make her happy, too.