Travelling with your wedding dress
When you are travelling whether to a venue in this country or abroad it pays to consider how to transport your wedding dress.
When a couture wedding dress leaves my salon, I am always conscious that it is just the start of its journey. I pack my wedding dresses on a padded hanger in a bridal cover with a roomy gusset to take a train or over skirt. Normally brides will collect their dresses by car and I suggest laying it as flat as possible over the seats.
The next stage of the journey your wedding dress will take is to the venue and my dresses have travelled around the world for the brides’ big day. If your wedding is overseas, I suggest you keep your dress by your side because suit cases do go missing and get delayed – but check with your airline first.
Some airlines will let you hang your wedding dress in the cabin wardrobe. Budget airlines are unlikely to offer this service. One of my brides found herself in this situation when she enquired about travelling to Gibraltar for her wedding this summer. To ensure her wedding dress arrives in perfect condition I am going to pack her dress in a wedding gown box with tissue paper between the layers of fabric before folding it to minimize creasing. The box will then go in a suitcase to carry on board.
Simply carrying your dress on board can be risky as sometimes gate or check in staff may refuse to allow you to carry it on board if it exceeds the dimensions for hand luggage. Remember if you are travelling to a popular wedding destination there could be other brides on board each demanding space for their dress so you will be competing for space.
If you are allowed to carry it you can always try laying your wedding dress flat in its cover across other passengers’ luggage in the overhead locker – if there is room. This could result in creasing so take a travel size steamer with you. These are not expensive and could save the day. If you are lucky there might be a spare seat on the plane where you could ask to leave your dress. But this is rather a hit and miss approach.
When Amy, another of my brides, booked her flight to Barcelona for her wedding she was so protective of her dream dress that she booked the seat next to her solely for her couture wedding dress. Hundreds of hours of handwork had gone into making her appliqué dress and over skirt and it would have been impossible to replace.
Jennifer lives in the US and she was visiting London when she came across my website www.elizabethbessant.co.uk and fell in love with my beaded crinkle dresses. She was not going to be in London for long and asked if I could make her a dress and ship it to America where her wedding was to be held.
I made her a calf length banana and ivory satin crinkle dress with a chiffon handkerchief hem. Hundreds of pearls and crystals along with appliqué flowers and twirls of chiffon created a true one off gown. Crinkle dresses are made for travel, a box and tissue paper and no worries about creasing it couldn’t be easier.
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