Make do and mend... recycled bridal fashion at Miss Bush

Upcycling is central to modern wedding design. From the Mason jar, mismatched vintage crockery and DIY bunting trends from the last decade, to industrial props, and loos made from horse boxes that I have seen this year. Re-purposing for novelty, economy or, simply for fun is a trend that is not going to go anywhere fast.

In terms of dresses, this trend is at something of an impasse.

Preloved is popular, but only to a point. The sanctity of a pure new dress is beyond symbolic. Even the faintest trace of a loose thread or a bead, let alone a mark in the weave of a fabric, can send a bride into a tailspin. Perish the thought that a dress may have immovable marks or damage.

Chopping up a family heirloom is a basic no-no for many. Understandably, a wedding dress is to be preserved and marvelled at by future generations. My first wedding dress from 25 years ago is most marvelled at for its unbelievably tiny dimensions!

A national lack of sewing ability, except at the very highest level of in-demand couture seamstresses, would hamper any amateur attempts to refashion a dress.

Sometimes ‘not quite vintage’ and ‘not quite new’ dresses can come on to the market following an acrimonious split or simply a disinclination to keep moving a dress from loft to wardrobe to under-bed storage.

Sample selling is essential for boutique businesses; it is imperative to release the capital investment in samples to buy new ones. The ability to do this is, again, limited by size and the condition of the dress.

Then there is the scourge of business failures. Take Berketex, Alfred Angelo or Benjamin Roberts, or any other failed brand or manufacturer. These businesses tend to fail because they invest too heavily in mass amounts of not very nice dresses, which are sadly destined for liquidation sales or landfill. It’s hard to make a silk purse out of a polyester ear…

Fragility, fit and fashion can hamper the upcycle process in bridal, so too can a lack of vision. As an experiment to find out how we can recycle our own samples, I challenged Jo Ewans, the production supremo at Miss Bush to reinvent a Houghton NYC dress.

Houghton NYC was the brainchild of stylist Katherine Polk. I adored the dresses, and Katherine speaks candidly in an article for Nylon magazine on the difficulties of running a niche brand and the problems scaling up artisan businesses here.

The Bentley dress was unusual, ground breaking and ahead of its time, but it arrived after the Brexit referendum and the sterling drop, pushing it to a price point where its inherent coolness made it marginal at best.