For many women in my country keeping their wedding dress is the most natural way of handling it and the most evident decision. As well as saving their marriage. Sometimes at any cost.
After preserving their dresses carefully and superstitiously for decades, it gets very important to fit them again. Even if it is tight and awkward.
In most cases women keep their wedding gowns as a memory and just sometimes in virtue of utility. My characters’ childhood moments are featured by their moms’ and grannies’ wedding gowns. Those memories are full in glamour, magic, perfection and beauty. Also, there sound their grannies’ words of keeping the dress and bridal veil at home without carrying them out, not showing to anybody and not letting anybody to have them. That is the precondition for strong and forever marriage.
Replication of prior experience is a main feature of memory. So, my characters’ young
daughters already tend towards wearing their moms’ wedding gowns during the ceremony. A white dress turns into a self-replicating pattern. Their grannies’ message integrates into a women’s collective memory. The instructions are not a subject to reasoning and work automatically being accompanied by myth and superstition living in our mind.
The articles of the wedding gown, being endowed with power, symbols and senses, become fetish. While I come across with it, the modernity is starting to fall apart.
Some women go on keeping their dresses due to some unconscious reasons they are not able to voice. The real or imaginary value of those things is so great but the event related to them is of such importance that sometimes it seems to me that the memory of it substitutes life itself. Everything can be dramatically different here and now. But women keep turning mentally and ritually to that important day by keeping and wearing those dresses for anniversaries.
