And the Bride Wore Her Mother’s Dress

After Dacia Di Gerolamo’s boyfriend, Evan Toth, proposed to her on Valentine’s Day 2023, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, after saying yes: Try on her mother’s wedding dress, which had been carefully stored in the family’s garage for nearly 30 years.

“When we unboxed it, we were really unsure,” said Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth, as she is now known. She had seen other unboxing videos on social media and knew that sometimes long-stored gowns didn’t hold up. But the dress, an ivory-gold satin confection with an enormous, detachable tulle train, that her mother, Leis Di Gerolamo, wore in 1994, was not only in perfect condition — it was, to Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth’s shock, a “perfect fit.”

Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth, a 32-year-old senior manager of new business development who lives in Arcadia, Calif., wanted to wear white on her wedding day, so she asked Cindy Ayvar, a designer in Burbank, to give the dress a new life as her rehearsal dinner dress.

Ms. Ayvar worked to modernize the ’90s dress by shortening it, raising the waistline and adjusting the sleeves to make it work with the bride’s petite frame. “She needed to be the one that walks the dress, not the dress walking her,” Ms. Ayvar said.

More brides have been upcycling their mother’s wedding dresses for rehearsal dinners, receptions, elopements or the ceremony itself. Motivating factors include sustainability, sentimentality and, of course, social media, where brides document the before, during and after. Some brides, like Ms. Di Gerolamo-Toth, surprise their mothers with the final result. (On Facebook, a video of a bride surprising her mother by walking down the aisle during her rehearsal has over a million “likes.”)