And you all thought I was crazy!

So I've gotten a lot of grief over the last week about my decision to trash my wedding dress; I think part of this is just due to the fact it's not a popular idea in Utah yet. Web sites such as www.trashthedress.com and http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/ show pictures of the ever growing trend from back East such as the ones shown below. In an article in the New York Times by writer Caren Chesler titled "Is this any way to treat Vera Wang?", Chesler talks to women who are about to trash their dresses and finding out what crazy reason they had behind it.

John Michael Cooper, a Las Vegas wedding photographer, is credited for the original idea back in 2005. The idea behind trashing the dress was simply this: you wear your wedding dress pretty much twice, once for the wedding and once for the bridal portraits. Now if you're spending all that money on a wedding dress, why not have a little fun with it?

I got lucky and only spent $500 on a dress I absolutely fell in love with, but still I wanted to have a little more character to my photos and bring out myself, not just another pretty picture that looks like every other pretty picture ever taken. Why not? I had a wedding that ended up being a dream come true with it's added touch of humor, why not just add a little more in my photos?

Now of course some of these photos from these Web sites are really neat simply because where they were shot, but also because it's so out of the ordinary. These photos, to me, were beautiful, but for my style it just wasn't fun enough. So I had to become a little bit more creative with my ideas as to how I was going to trash my wedding dress. That's when I saw these photos of people using unusual places to capture unusual moments and I knew I could find something cool.






These photos, found at www.photoalberta.blogspot.com, http://blog.2020images.com/2008/04/07/urban-style-trash-
the-dress-wow.aspx and http://www.weblo.com/domain/
available/trashthedress.com/ (shown to the right) showed a lot of personality and style, most of all they showed attitude. This was more my style. You're probably looking at the photo of the paint and thinking, "Oh my God is she crazy!" I can't say that paintballing didn't go through my mind at some point in time, but that's not what I ended up going with.

The photographer who was doing the portraits had never done photos like these before, so she went out hunting for spots, and I spent time brainstorming with my friends and family.
Ultimately my mom came up with the idea of going

to the splash pad on Main Street in town, and my photographer, Toni Rowley, came up with the dramatic alleyway idea. We shot the photos on Monday, and will take about two weeks to get back after editing.

In the end it all comes down to this: Chesler, yes that is the way to treat the dress. And would you rather have your wedding dress sitting in a box in the back of a closet for life, or have some great photos to remember it all?

To read the article "Is this any way to treat Vera Want?" visit http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/fashion/weddings/10trash.html.