Wedding Blog

After the failed attempt to rent my wedding dress, I decided to look for a previously loved (a.k.a. used) wedding dress.

In my search for used wedding dresses I came upon Brides Against Breast Cancer. Brides Against Breast Cancer does a national tour selling donated wedding dresses (both new and used). The tour sells the dresses to raise money for the Making Memories Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing a spark of joy into the lives of women and men who are losing their battle against breast cancer.

This is the perfect combination of my ecofriendly dress hunt - buying used dresses, saving money and donating to a great cause! Unfortunately, while I very much wanted to shop for my dress at a BABC event, the show wasn’t going to be making it to my neck of the woods for quite some time!


My next stop for pre owned wedding dresses was The Bridal Garden in New York City. The Bridal Garden is New York City’s only non-profit bridal shop selling designer and couture bridal gowns. All the proceeds are donated to benefit education of New York City children. Several other bees have also shopped at The Bridal Garden including Miss Hot Cocoa and Mrs. Butterfly. I had a great experience shopping at The Bridal Garden! The shop is pretty small but it is only open by appointment so it didn’t get too crowded. The staff wasn’t very overbearing and my friends and I were able to browse the racks without pressure. I think I tried on about five or six dresses here and found one serious contender. The dresses were beautiful but some of them needed quite a bit of repair/tailoring and I felt that the dress price combined with the extensive alterations would push me out of my budget. While I didn’t end up getting my dress here I would highly recommend it!

My search for a pre owned dress continued uptown at Michael’s: The Consignment Shop for Women on 79th and Madison. This consignment shop has a small bridal salon on the second floor. The rules say that you have 30 minutes to try on five dresses. The selection is pretty small, maybe 50 dresses total, so the limits didn’t really seem unreasonable since there were a limited number of dresses in my size. I found several close contenders here too but I didn’t find the dress.

The internet is another option for buying used wedding dresses. Personally, I really wasn’t comfortable with buying online. I needed to see and feel the dress on me and I didn’t have the patience (or to be honest, the trust) to shop online. That being said, many bees have been successful purchasing dresses the interweb. Miss Hot Cocoa just did a great post about how to buy a wedding dress online and Mrs. Tulip also did a wonderful two-part post last fall about buying a wedding dress on eBay (Part I & Part II).

A few popular website for used wedding dress:

• Once Wed: Designer dresses for less. A free listing service for used wedding dresses.
• Pre owned Wedding Dresses: PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com is a listing service designed to connect buyers and sellers of new, sample and used designer wedding dresses.
• The Dressmarket: The Dressmarket offers brides-to-be an opportunity to find once worn and never worn wedding gowns from private sales , boutique overstocks or designer samples as well as bridesmaids dresses and other wedding items for a fraction of their original cost.
• Your Dream Dress: Most of the gowns are samples from high-end couture bridal salons or overstock from designers. Most likely, the gowns that are from retail stores have been tried on at least once.
• Encore Bridal: Online store, selling used, pre-owned, couture wedding gowns and bridal accessories. A portion of the profit from every sale is given to charities that support cervical cancer research and education.

The “Search for an Ecofriendly Wedding Dress” will be continued…