A soon to be bride, Abigail Kingston, is warming up
to wear a 120-year-old wedding dress worn by 10 other women in her
family on their big days.
The ancient two-piece dress is a family heritage
first worn by Kingston’s great-great-grandmother, Mary Lowry Warren
in 1895. None of Warren’s daughters were interested in the large
gown, so it was first re-worn by her granddaughter in the 1940s.
Later, Kingston’s mother, Leslie, and aunts continued the rare
tradition by getting married in the same dress.
“When I was younger, while I was playing piano at
my parents’ house, there was a framed picture of the first six
brides wearing the dress, so I would think and say, ‘Someday, I too
would put on that dress on my wedding day’,” she said.
Leslie supported the idea as soon as Kingston
signified interest in wearing the special dress on her big day. The
gown which was last seen in 1991 before the two eventually tracked it
to the mother of the last user who usually kept it safe as part of
the family tradition, was still useable. But when the dress finally
arrived their Pennsylvania, United States home, it was in a bit
terrible state. The sleeves were disintegrating, the fabric was
filled with holes and the satin had browned with age. It was also
very short for Kingston.
The iconic family dress had been through several
alterations over the last 12 decades even though it had only been
dry-cleaned once in all these years.
But to get the special dress back in shape and well
ahead of her wedding day, Kingston contacted Deborah LoPresti, a
bridal designer, who spent 200 hours painstakingly restoring it to
its original beauty. With the help of Gary Harper, a seasoned laundry
man, the dress was brought back to life even though the sleeves had
to go.
“We needed to replace the sleeves,” the bride to
be told Lehigh Valley Live. “I was very sad about that fact. But
the sleeves gave up their lives for a very important purpose: to save
the rest of the dress.”
LoPresti combed through New York’s garment
district for the right charmeuse silk satin to match the original
color. She made new sleeves from this material – exact replicas of
the sleeves on the original dress – down to the 80 hand sewn pleats
on each sleeve. She then used the remnants of the old sleeves to
patch holes throughout the gown.
After five dress fittings and six months of
alterations, Kingston said slipping into the finished dress would be
one of the most magnificent moments of her life.
“At that moment, I sure would feel like
Cinderella,” she told Buzzfeed. “The sleeves were in rags and my
fairy godmother made it back into this beautiful dress. I never
imagined that I would ever put that dress on, and I know it is going
to fit perfectly.”
Another soon-to- be-bride is already warming up to
continue with the age-long and unique tradition, becoming the 12th in
the process.
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