In 2022, Gwendolyn Stulgis gave away her wedding dress to a stranger. She was not trying to start anything. She just did not think the dress should spend the rest of its life in a closet collecting dust.
She had found it at the end of a long day of shopping. Price and cut were the two things that mattered to her, and nothing at the bridal shop had struck a chord. She was on her way out when the saleswoman stopped her. “Well, hold on a second,” the woman said. “I think I have something for you.”
It was champagne colored, with long sleeves and sparkly lace, and buttons that started in the middle of the back and ran all the way down into the train. Stulgis stood there and got tears in her eyes. It was over her budget. Her mother-in-law told her to buy it, so she did.
After the wedding she wanted the dress to go to somebody who needed one, and she could not work out how to arrange that, so she put something on Facebook. She was not ready for what came back. More than seventy messages arrived, every one of them from a bride describing what the dress would mean to her.
She chose one of them, a woman who lived nearby, and gave the dress away.
That should have been the end of it. Instead more women wrote, some looking for a dress and some offering their own, and Stulgis started a Facebook group called Shared Dream Dresses to keep up with them. By the time NPR reported the story in July 2022, she estimated more than two hundred dresses had changed hands since that June. One woman gave away her wedding dress, and two hundred more followed her.
One condition
Diana Bowman handed a dress to the group and had a specific reason for it. She had been through the same search, with something extra working against her. She is a plus-sized woman, and by her account finding a wedding dress in plus sizes is really, really difficult. Taking that particular stress off somebody else was the whole point of giving hers up.
She did it on one condition, which was that the dress keep moving.
I hope that this dress gets passed from bride to bride to bride, and it just gets worn out and is in tatters at the end of its life because of all the celebrating that’s done in it.
Seventy answers to one post
Seventy women answered a Facebook post about one used dress. Stulgis could give it to one of them. The reporting does not say what became of the rest, and we are not going to guess. But the size of that response is the part we keep coming back to. The need was already there, in numbers, before anybody built a thing to gather it up.
According to NPR, finding a wedding dress can be stressful and prohibitively expensive for many brides. That is the plain version of what those seventy messages were saying.
Somebody had a dress. Somebody needed one. A post put them in the same room and no money changed hands. It is not a new pattern and it is not a Facebook one. A borrowed red dress in 2007 did the same work on a message board for the parents of West Point cadets.
Bowman’s condition is the part we would keep if we could only keep one thing. Not that the dress be preserved. That it be worn out.
Where this story comes from
Originally reported by Michael Levitt and Justine Kenin for NPR on All Things Considered, published July 22, 2022, and adapted for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo. Retold here with the details as that report gives them. The woman who received the first dress is not named in the reporting and is not named here.
