Something Old, in the Only Way That Counts
Our Marketing and Social Media Director on the return of the trousseau, vintage bridal, and choosing memory over newness.
We're handing the mic to our Marketing and Social Media Director, Gabrielle, for a special one this week. As she plans her own wedding in historic St Andrews, Scotland, she makes the case for vintage bridal, the trousseau, and dresses that carry real memories instead of trend-of-the-season polish. A beauty-focused part two is on the way, so stay tuned.
The modern wedding dress has a problem it won’t admit: it’s beautiful, but it’s blank. Clean, low-back, interchangeable, the same three silhouettes on my feed. The brides that I find the most interesting are reaching backwards instead, towards lace with weight and real-craftsmanship behind it, cut-outs that mean something, a small sentiment stitched in where only she knows. That line may be a little biased, as I myself am one of them. I’m getting married in St Andrews, Scotland, the place my fiancé and I met, in a town old enough to make a brand-new dress feel slightly out-of-place.
Today, brides are leaning more towards particular over perfect, with small, intimate details replacing the “traditions” of the past few years. Some of the biggest names in vintage and archival bridal are in New York, and more and more brides are coming to them looking for a dress that doubles as their something old. Wanting that backstory is the same impulse stretched a bit further. A bride choosing a dress that means something isn’t shopping anymore; she is authoring her day and the dress is just the start. Once you’re curating instead of shopping, two things follow without anyone deciding them on purpose. You want a piece with a story that can’t be faked. And you want more than one of them.
The single perfect wedding dress was not always the norm. For most of history a bride had her trousseau, a whole wardrobe assembled for the occasion and beyond. The one-gown wedding is the anomaly throughout history, a 20th-century compression of something that used to have range. What looks like brides wanting more dresses, is really brides remembering they were supposed to have a full wardrobe all along.
Pinterest, most brides first stop after the ring hits their finger, has released their 2026 Wedding Trends Report. Last year people made over 7-billion wedding related searches and saved 16.7-billion pins globally, while calling the cookie-cutter wedding finished. GWI found that couples were increasingly drawn to celebrations that reflect who they are, rather than what is expected of them. And to no surprise, the wardrobe is following. According to Google Trends, search interest for a second look or “reception dress” has increased steadily over the past several years, a moment many trace back to Meghan Markle changing into a second gown after her 2018 ceremony.
So I stopped planning a dress and started planning a wardrobe, with three looks alone for the wedding day.
Along with getting married in Scotland, my Senior and Masters theses revolved around dressing the past and the stories behind garments, so looking at this season’s dresses was never something that crossed my mind.
My ceremony dress is the jaw-dropping one. Think drop waist, a big skirt with heavy draping, ivory tones, and workmanship that deserves to be inspected closely. The hunt for the base of this dress has led me to Happy Isles, SoHo location. Lily Kaizer opened the brand in 2016 in LA and has since expanded to New York, setting the vintage bridal salon standard ever since. As to why she believes that brides are now looking for vintage, Kaizer told ELLE “Vintage bridal is the perfect marriage of smart shopping and sartorial elevation. It also checks a lot of boxes: Something old, something borrowed, and if you go with Madame Grès at Happy Isles, something blue”.
After the base has been chosen, that is when it starts to get turned into mine. The lace and buttons are from my mother’s wedding dress. I’m not a lace person by default, which is exactly why it has to mean something. Inside, where no one will see it, the coordinates of the chapel at St Andrews to go with our wedding date and our initials. It’s a dress that already carries the memories of the past and now has the address of mine. That is the only kind of new I want.
If the ceremony dress is about everything it carries, the reception dress is about what it can drop. I want to pair back and let the lines of the garment do the talking. A silk slip, cut on the bias with an open back and a sleek piece of fabric draping down my spine. An ethereal piece that beckons to the past without truly being able to be pinned down in one decade. Studio Dorothy is the store I am the most drawn to for this piece because of the sentiment behind their business. The studio is named after the founder’s grandmother and is located in their families apartment in the city. The slip dress is one of the most quietly enduring vintage silhouettes there is, and I feel like this setting does the gown justice.
As we move into the look for the afterparty, this is where things start to get fun. I’m still deciding between a jumpsuit or a two-piece but either way it will be beaded and Cha Cha Linda Vintage in Brooklyn is exactly where this piece lives. Following the last two dresses, this is the look that is allowed to misbehave, the one that is allowed to stand out from its settings. A piece that has memories of parties past and is perfect for the bride veering off the traditional route. Cha Cha’s social media accounts are full of beaded, colorful looks, each one more fun than the rest.
Three dresses, three eras, one instinct. None of them are from this season. All of them hold memories, which is the only true quality for which I’m shopping. And, none of this is just me. Vintage is doing to bridal what it already did to everything else; making newness feel like the least interesting option in the room.
Zola’s First Look Report recently came out and it found that 17% of couples are thrifting or sustainably sourcing their wedding looks, up 3% from the year before. The push for vintage has begun to get so big that David’s Bridal, one of the biggest bridal retailers in the country, has begun reaching back into their own archives. “Exclusivity is the number one luxury”, said Lizzie Wheeler, Studio Dorothy’s founder to Who What Wear earlier this year. “And as style becomes more and more referential, people start to think, ‘Why wouldn’t I want the original version.’”
Obviously my fiancé and I chose our venue before I started looking at dresses. That is what truly explains all of this. St Andrews isn’t just where we met and went to Undergrad. It’s a deeply historic town tied to the Scottish Reformation and whose University was founded before our country was technically discovered. This isn’t a rented castle we’re dressing up for images. This is a historic Chapel, in the heart of St Andrews quad, that sits maybe 20 feet from where we first met. It’s our personal history. This is the part that the trend reports tend to miss. A vintage dress isn’t something a bride chooses on a whim. It is what happens when she starts favoring her story and crafting her day around that, rather than this season’s latest style.
The wedding dress lost its memory somewhere along the way. I’m not fixing that with one dress. I’m doing it with three: a return to the Trousseau with sentiment stitched in. And I’ll be honest, newness and polish were never going to survive a town this historic anyway.
