1. Put it in a zippered plastic case. This is a very easy way of storing your wedding dress so you know what it is just by looking at it. These zippered cases come in multiple sizes and if your silhouette didn’t have a bustle sewn into it your dress should easily fold up to fit. There are some outlets where you can get the type of bag that allows you to suck as much air out as possible, which not only protects the dress better but makes the case smaller and thus easier to fit wherever you want to put it.

2. Put it in a suitcase. Since suitcases come in multiple sizes it should be easy enough to find a suitcase to fit your needs. Since it’s for storage you don’t have to spend an extravagant amount of money on it and you can lock it up if you want the feeling of more security.

3. Lock it up in a trunk. A trunk is a nice place to not only keep your wedding dress but your other wedding keepsakes as well. Like the first two items, trunks come in multiple sizes and with the wedding dress as the main occupant, it won’t be all that heavy if you need to move it around. You can also lock up your trunk.

4. Store it in a cardboard box. This is probably the most expedient thing to do but probably the worst choice of all the options. While cardboard boxes can serve a lot of functions they’re not all that secure, can be damaged very easily by the elements, are somewhat porous which means dust and scents can invade it, and boxes can degrade over time, sometimes quickly depending on the environment around where you’re storing the dress. Still, they’re easy to find and if you pop the dress in a plastic bag it’ll offer at least some bit of protection.

One of the questions Zaslow gets answered in the book is why women are willing to spend so much money in getting a wedding gown that they may only wear once in their lives, even to the point of possibly never having a daughter they can pass their dresses on to. The response is that wedding dresses offer “The power of memory, and of hope. When a bride steps into the Magic Room, she thinks of all the moments that led her there. And she hopes for everything that’s to come.”

The main room of Becker’s Bridal Shop is called the “magic room”, the room where all dreams come together, where all brides that enter become one with each other and those that have come before them. It’s actually the final room where brides that have made their selection of the gown they want go to see how it looks on them, the centerpiece of a much larger space where the bride gets personal time with her choice.

The room is bathed in a soft light with lots of mirrors, and offers the choice of more than 2,500 wedding gowns that potential brides can shift through, way more than the population of the city, which is around 1,100. And it’s estimated that more than 100,000 brides have crossed their doors throughout history.

The reason this book would be a great read for all brides is that it has a way of capturing the feeling that many brides have as they sift through many choices of wedding gowns, trying to find the one that they hope will capture all their dreams and aspirations of what getting married is all about. It’s more a book of a sisterhood than a profile of a store in Michigan. It’ll touch your heart with a sense of camaraderie; go ahead, give it a shot.

Hello Kitty Wedding Dress by Sanrio

Enter pink. Pink is a favorite color overall by many women, and thus there’s a large consumer market for pink wedding dresses. Many of the top wedding gown designers will add at least one pink wedding dress to their ensemble whenever they have wedding shows or wedding gown collections, and they always seem to be a hit. Even that Hello Kitty wedding dress above has become a major sensation in Japan; sorry ladies, but it’s not being sold in the U.S. just yet.

via Wedding Inspirasi

In general pink, for wedding purposes, stands for romance and sweetness, and one couldn’t deny that seems to be evidenced by these couple of pink wedding dresses. While most brides wearing pink probably wouldn’t have a pink rose bouquet, which signifies happiness, white would work well, as it signifies beauty innocence and charm. Such a wonderful combination to be sure.

Pink offers a wonderful choice for a wedding gown, especially in today’s age. It doesn’t need a lot of bling to bring it all together, and let’s face it, if it’s good enough for Reese Witherspoon, it’s a nice choice for everyone.

by Valerie Everett via Flickr

Of course without being there it’s hard to determine what the real truth is, but it prompted us to think about other things that could be done with used wedding dresses, whether it’s corporations or individuals that have decided they won’t want or need their wedding dresses anymore. Here are some ideas better than spray painting them:

1. Donate them to a good cause. There are lots of good causes out there; military brides, brides without money, the Salvation Army, an auction for charity, etc. Everyone’s looking for quality items that could help them raise money, and most of the time all it takes is looking in the newspaper to see what’s going on around your own town where someone’s trying to raise funds.

2. Sell it at a consignment shop. Maybe you can get some money from your dress by going to a consignment shop and sharing in the profit from selling it. Consignment shops can be dicey because if an item doesn’t sell you don’t get anything for it, plus the owners of these shops get to set the price. Still, if it sells you could do well.

3. Sell it yourself. You could advertise in the newspaper or on a site like Craigslist and get to keep all the profits. Of course, this will involve your feeling comfortable enough for people to come to your home since it might be unrealistic carting a wedding dress all around town for people to see it.

4. Contact a wedding outlet store to see if they’d be interested. If you have a designer gown that looks pretty good, it’s possible that an outlet store would be interested and offer you a fair price, knowing that the resell value for such a gown would be high once they cleaned it up a bit.

Aren’t these options much better than spray painting?

by Charlot West via Flickr

If you happen to be a plus size bride, a mermaid style wedding gown probably would not be the best fit for you. You also might not want to wear a wedding gown where the bodice has a deep cleavage or not enough support. Making a decision of how much skin you’re willing to show is obviously a personal choice, but it might be more important to you to feel comfortable than it might be trying to wear wedding fashion that would look better on a model.

If you happen to be a very shapely woman, you might feel inspired enough to wear something a bit tighter and more flattering, but if your personality is such that you don’t usually like that kind of attention, you might feel better going with something a little less restricting such as a Sabrina style wedding gown or even a princess model.

Princess wedding gowns actually work well for all types of bodies because they make every bride look elegant and also offer a lot of room for movement in the silhouette. They also take the emphasis away from the bride’s body and puts it more into a bright personality as well as gives everyone else sees them a sense that something special is about to happen. However, if the hoop is big then it can make some plus sized brides look bigger as well, so you need to guard against that.

If you’re a petite bride, you might tend to feel lost in many princess style wedding gowns, while at the same time not quite feeling as though you could fill out a mermaid wedding style dress. For you, an A-line wedding dress with spaghetti straps and a jacket might be the most flattering for your body type. It certainly gives the bride a sense of grace and innocence, which is the type of thing that most people who go to weddings want to feel about a bride.

The main thing about selecting the wedding gown for yourself is what you’re trying to achieve as it pertains to how you want others to view you. Remember that all eyes are going to be on you regardless of whether you try to expound upon your sexual appeal or not, so you don’t have to try as hard to make yourself stand out in the crowd. Stay within your comfort level and don’t worry what anyone else might think. It’s your wedding day after all, so just go with what makes you feel comfortable and what you know you will look good in.

Having touched that, it seems that there is a lot of discussion lately as to just how much skin should be shown on a wedding gown, whether it’s considered sexy or not. A lot of the discussion has been around strapless wedding gowns and the lack of sleeves in wedding gowns these days. Many critics are saying that strapless wedding gowns have been done in that a style that goes back to 1996, when Carolyn Bessette married John Kennedy Jr. They decry the loss of grace and style that sleeves and straps can add to a wedding dress.

Also, there are complaints about designers who are starting to cut patches of fabric out of wedding gowns in favor of showing skin in areas around the waist and even around the stomach. Some of the newer two-piece wedding ensembles are mimicking the styles that younger women are wearing today and exposing the midriff. And of course, mini-wedding dresses can still get shorter than they’ve been.

The truth is that although a wedding dress with very little fabric can be titillating, there’s nothing quite as spectacular as seeing what a designer can do with a full design for the entire body. Whether a dress is strapless or not is one thing, but if that same dress is so low cut that it’s going to have the guests at the wedding taking bets on whether the bride is going to fall out of it during the ceremony, that might be a distraction that most brides wouldn’t want to have to deal with throughout the day.

It would be a shame if designers like the Pronovias Group, which makes some of the sexiest wedding dresses in the world that cover a woman’s entire body, decided to take the easy way out and just made dresses that expose as much of a woman’s skin as possible. It would be a shame if Badgley Mishkin decided that less was more and we never got to see any of their elegant wedding designs ever again.

Sexy is a state of mind. Sexy is not trying to figure out who can reveal the most skin without showing all the parts that aren’t supposed to be shown in public. The overwhelming majority of women still want to buy glamorous wedding gowns and wedding gowns that are going to make them look good and feel special. They know that all eyes are on them, and don’t have to go for shock value to make sure. This doesn’t mean that if a bride wants to wear a revealing wedding gown that she shouldn’t, just that we don’t feel it’s a necessary thing for anyone who decides that they want to wear a sexy wedding gown.

However, at a certain point even a sample has had its best day and is time to be replaced. Stores have to figure out what to do with those wedding gowns. Sometimes they’ll try to have special sales for all their samples, which may or may not work all that well. The problem is that they only get so many samples, which means the sizes are limited. If someone comes in and wants to buy a sample that’s too small, they may be out of luck because it’s also possible that wedding down has been discontinued.

Therefore, their next option is to sell those samples at drastically reduced rates to online discount wedding sites for resale. By looking for these dresses online, you might not only have better luck in finding a higher number of wedding gowns that are in your size, but the prices for these sample wedding gowns can be drastically lower than other discounted wedding gowns.

Of course, sample wedding gowns may come with problems other wedding gowns don’t have. A sample that’s had many wearers could be stained and harder to get clean. It could have multiple things wrong with it as it pertains to stitching and discoloration. However, it’s possible that even with those problems you might be able to do something special with it.

If you can find a sample wedding gown that you like, you have the possibility of finding something that no one else has ever worn at their wedding, at a price that’s easy on your wallet and a vision that will have others in awe.

The first thing many women do once the wedding date is set, is start a diet so that they’ll be able to fit into the dress of their dreams. But no amount of dieting can get everyone into a Size 2 —or even a Size 12. But even plus-sized brides should be able to feel beautiful on their wedding day. Although there are a number of online sites that offer some styles, Vows Bridal Boutique’s BridePower.com prides itself on being one of the few stores in the United States fully committed to “real size” women.

Instead of just having one or two samples, prospective brides have a full complement of dresses to try on, with a full selection of samples from top collections in sizes 18 – 40 and “W” sizes, meaning women don’t have to try and squeeze into a too-small sample. Among the special occasion dresses that are offered are Liv Harris, Reem Acra, and Vera Wang.

Research indicates plus-size women were more likely to put off buying a dress for a number of reasons, including waiting in order to have more time to diet; concern they would not be able to find anything in their size that looked good; not knowing where to find plus-sized designer dresses; embarrassment; and an aversion to the shopping process in general. Vows Bridal Outlet is designed to make the entire buying process user-friendly and staffers are trained to specifically assist with plus size wedding dresses for full-figured brides.

Q – What has been the biggest issue you’ve had with trying to find a gown for your wedding?

A – There’s just so many choices that it gets overwhelming. In my mind I have mixed images of what I want, then I see so many other pretty wedding dresses that I just don’t know what to do.

Q – What type of style does your mind see?

A – This might sound silly but I have this image of the dress Cinderella wore in the Disney movie as well as the one Kate Hudson wore in the movie Bride Wars. I like the idea of a big, showy dress with lots of lace, but I also want to be comfortable. And of course I have to make sure I can afford it.

Q – What kind of price range are you looking at?

A – That’s the scary part. I didn’t know dresses could cost so much, so I went into it thinking I could find something I wanted for less than $1,000. Locally I haven’t seen anything I like close to that price.

Q – Have you tried looking online for a wedding dress?

A – Yes, but there’s so many choices there as well. You just never know if what you’re looking at is really what you’re going to get.

Q – Even so, if you looked at a discount wedding site you might find a dress you can afford and then could take it to someone to alter it if you needed to right?

A – That’s always a possibility. I have to admit that I have seen a couple of gowns online that I’ve liked a lot.

Q – Have you thought about a particular color?

A – I’m kind of traditional so I know I’m looking for a white gown. I really want it lacy though, or with the kind of netting that Kate’s dress looked like. Even though I’ve dreamed about the Cinderella dress, I think it might be a bit outdated for me.

Q – What will help you make a final decision?

A – I keep thinking that I’ll know the dress I want when I see it. But I think that one day I’ll just make a decision and live with it; can’t look at dresses forever.

by Simon Brass via Flickr

1. Salvation Army. This is one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States, and they have a thrift store where they’ll sell things to help others. They have offices in every state and in most large cities, and they help millions of people in some fashion every year.

2. Hospice. Many hospice organizations either have a thrift store of their own or some other outlet that helps them raise money. Hospice takes care of people that have less than six months to live. They also help families deal with grief. When you help hospice, you help your neighbors.

3. The military. There are many enlisted men looking to get married to brides that can’t afford lavish wedding dresses. The same goes for women in the military because military pay isn’t great. Often they’ll donate these dresses rather than sell them, but sometimes they’ll sell them in the base exchange. You can do this through Brides Across America.

4. Charity auctions. There’s always an auction for some cause and if you have a great wedding dress it could draw a lot of money for that charity. This could be for anything such as feeding the poor, raising money to fight disease, even helping organizations that work with kids.

5. Brides Against Breast Cancer will use your dress to either sell it to raise money or donate it to someone undergoing treatment that can’t afford to buy a wedding dress for herself.

With all of these, if you care, you can get a receipt and potentially write off your donation on your taxes; that might be an incentive for some.