Re-wearing Your Wedding Dress

For our anniversary Date this year I decided I wanted to try to wear my wedding dress again. Now that I've lost all my baby weight it seemed like a good time to break it back out and get at least one more use out of it. I am seriously so in love with this dress, It makes me feel beautiful and comfortable and elegant all at once (which is how all brides should feel in my opinion!).

When I got engaged 4 years ago finding the perfect dress was of course on the top of my to do list. I knew I didn't want a "wedding dress" per se and I absolutely cringed at the thought of going to a bridal salon. I looked in to a number of short options that in the end just didn't feel special enough to me and then I came across my dress at a Nordstroms in the mall. It was perfect, in my price range, beautiful, comfy and fit me like a glove. I snapped it up that day and never looked back. It was also a great shopping experience with no pushy sales people hovering around me, no standing on a pedestal in the middle of the showroom and only my most trusted fashion advisor (my Mom!) was in attendance.

Your wedding dress is probably the most expensive item of clothing you own. For me it certainly is and mine even came in at the bargain price of $360, which is expensive for a dress but a steal for a wedding dress. I always thought it was such a shame to spend so much money on this beautiful, perfect dress that you love and then never get to wear it again. While my dress is definitely formal, found in the evening gown department, I felt like it was simple enough that I could style it in such a way that it would be appropriate for a date night.

For our date we were headed to The Family Dog , a bar in Virginia Highlands for drinks and appetizers, afterward we headed across the street to Rosebud, a more formal restaurant owned by the same people. The whole experience was fairly casual since we aren't really good at being fancy people but it was a nice step up from the kind of places we would normally go out to eat and a nice break from cooking at home which we do 99% of the time. To dress down my wedding gown I paired it with brown leather boots and belt, a denim jacket an owl necklace and a brown feathered headband. You can see how I styled the dress for my actual wedding day in my previous post.

The whole outfit came across as a nice kind of bohemian ensemble and I actually got quite a few compliments on it. It felt great to get to wear the dress again a relive a few of my warm and fuzzy wedding memories as well. I feel inspired now to try to find other ways to re-wear my dress. Have you found a way to wear your wedding dress again? I've had this idea for ages to host a wedding dress party for all my married girl friends where we would all get to wear our dress again. Who wants to do this with me? Come on, it'll be awesome! :-)