Hannah’s Heirloom Wedding Dress Refashion

One dress, two brides, one story.

Hannah is one of my daughter's oldest friends—part of a tight-knit group of girls who found each other in kindergarten and spent years sharing classrooms, soccer fields, and after-school activities. When Hannah decided to wear her mother's vintage wedding gown and asked me to refashion it, I felt the profound weight of what I was being trusted with: not just a dress, but a piece of her mother's history, remade to carry her forward into her own marriage.

The original gown had been made for a different body, a different decade, and a different kind of wedding. My task as a textile artist was to alter and modernize the silhouette without erasing what it already carried. I took in the bodice, reworked the skirt, and kept every inch of the original lace intact.

Hannah and her mom came to every fitting together—the three of us co-conspirators getting the dress, and Hannah, just right, down to conversations about socks and underwear (because as moms, no detail is ever too small). Hannah wore her refashioned heirloom dress to marry Camilo in a beautiful tropical garden setting in Bogotá, Colombia, with her parents watching. While I couldn't be there in person, I was deeply honored to be part of their story in this way. This project is deeply personal to me.