Wedding dress preservation: Everything you should know

Today, brides have a lot of options when it comes to what they desire to do with their wedding dresses after the wedding day. Some sell their wedding dresses while others donate them. There are also some people who repurpose their wedding gowns into cocktail attire. But many brides prefer to hang on to their jovani wedding dresses that represent a lot of love, celebration, and happiness. This is the reason why preserving wedding dresses is crucial. 

A wedding dress is often extremely delicate and intricately designed, and you cannot clean it just like any other dress out there. Wedding dress cleaning and preservation tend to be the key to ensuring that your dress lasts for longer. If you fail to preserve your wedding dress, you can risk yellowing of the fabric, mold and mildew growth, brown oxidation spots, and permanent fabric creasing. This page discusses wedding dress preservation.

Wedding dress preservation

Wedding dress preservation involves a series of specific cleaning and packaging techniques to make sure that these styles can retain their quality in the long run. It’s crucial to factor your wedding dress preservation into your total budget because it can be a significant investment to purchase several wedding preservation kits.

Wedding dress preservation is not like one-size-fits-all dry cleaning because it can start with the assessment by an experienced specialist. The specialist can create a specific treatment plan that depends on your wedding dress fabric, details, stitching, and many more. They can also analyze stains that may be along the hem as well as the entire wedding dress. 

You can also find some dry cleaners that specialize in wedding dress cleaning. Therefore, you can also use them, though you need to make sure that you vet their process first. You need to find a dry cleaner that utilizes a solvent gentle that is pure enough for a wedding dress. Other solvents utilized for regular dry cleaning can have impurities that may redeposit onto the wedding dress and leave it with a strange smell. And, wedding dress cleaning and preservation must be done with a dry cleaner that specializes in cleaning wedding dresses.  

Before you commit to any preservationist or dry cleaner, you should research thoroughly their policies. This is because you want a person who can guarantee that they cannot cause damage to your wedding dress during preservation. If they cause any damage, you should check a guarantee that has the cost of your wedding dress that needs to be refunded alongside the preservation charges. Besides, you should find out how long they can guarantee that your wedding gown will remain in great condition after their preservation services. 

Wedding dress preservation tips

In most cases, the most dangerous spills on your wedding dress can be hard to spot. For example, white wine and other things tend to dry clear, so these latent stains can have sugar that caramelizes in the long run to become dark brown stains that an average dry cleaning can fail to remove. There is a chance that you can think that your wedding dress is fine, but in a couple of months, the latent stain can become pale yellow and even darken as it ages. And, heat usually accelerates the process.

The good news is that professional preservationists and cleaners are trained to spot such stains. They can handle these stains on your wedding dress, including visible and invisible stains. Whether your wedding dress got dirty while taking pictures in a garden, someone sloshed red wine on it, or someone smudged its foundation, a professional cleaner or preservationist can create a treatment for any type of stain. 

There are also some other things you can do to preserve your wedding dress. You need to pay attention to the label that is on your wedding dress. You should look for any dry cleaning instructions it may have like only using a petroleum solvent to dry clean it. Whatever the label says, you should listen to it. And, make sure that the dry cleaner or preservationist you choose has the right cleaning solutions for the wedding dress. 

Professional cleaning is a crucial step when it comes to preserving your wedding dress, so you need to take your wedding dress to them early. Unfortunately, some brides choose to take their wedding dresses to the dry cleaner or preservationist after a few weeks. By that time, most stains may have had enough time to set in. 

Therefore, you should consider taking off your wedding dress after the reception is over and ensure that it goes to the dry cleaner the next day. But if you are going on a honeymoon, you need to arrange for your mother or bridesmaid to take it on your behalf.  

A preserved wedding dress is usually kept in an airtight box that has the oxygen removed and replaced with nitrogen. They do this to prevent oxidation which can lead to discoloration and aging. This often happens to clothes that are stored for a couple of years. A wedding dress specialist can recommend that you should not break the seal but if you do, then the wedding dress needs to be preserved and sealed back into the box again. 

After your wedding dress has been cleaned properly, you need to store it. This means you should protect it from direct sunlight, which can fade and turn the wedding dress yellow. Therefore, you need to remove it from the hanger which can cause the heaviest wedding dresses to misshapen. Regardless of what you do, you should never store your wedding dress in a zip-up plastic bag. This is because plastic like this can hold moisture and may discolor your wedding dress. 

You can only use acid-free plastic because most wedding preservation boxes are usually made from. You can also opt for a professional wedding preservation box or a wedding chest. Ideally, the safest way you can store your wedding dress for several years is to use an acid-free wedding chest as it is designed to protect your dress from light and air. Breathable bags offer short-term and safe storage, but they are not suitable for long-term storage.