“Trash the Dress” started in the United States and has gone around the world.
This is when brides have a post-nuptial photographic shoot in an unusual location in which their wedding dress is used as art.
It’s not as destructive as it sounds - sometimes the dress isn’t wrecked at all and can be easily restored to pristine condition by dry-cleaning.
Brides are photographed, sometimes with their husbands, swimming under water, lying on a beach, or walking barefoot on mountains or dunes.
Sometimes the dress is ruined - ripped, rolled around in mud, set on fire or painted with graffiti - but the outcome is still a creative and stunning picture. Some brides invest in a second dress to be trashed, if they want to keep the one in which they were married.
In some parts of the world, photographers include a “Trash the Dress” session in their wedding shoots, with some specialising in these images.
Wives can have these sessions days, weeks, months or years after their weddings. This is the idea behind Dirty Weddings Concepts in South Africa, which is about portraying the nuptial diva with attitude.
It’s also a good way to dust off that old tulle gown that occupies too much cupboard space and relive your special day - all the better if you need to shred it to accommodate extra kilograms gained.
Dirty Weddings Concepts is the brainchild of professional photographer Mark K and Mercédes Westbrook, a media specialist who started Style Exchange, a fashion exchange shop in Gallo Manor in Johannesburg.
It involves you stepping back into your own wedding dress, or one provided, and wearing it in a creative, amusing or ravaging way - then modelling it for a photoshoot. If you don’t need to keep it, you can rip it here and there, to make it provocative and sexy.
Mark K is a veteran photographer specialising in portraiture and the use of natural light in the outdoor environment. And according to Westbrook, his manner is “totally unthreatening” so you feel free to express your raunchy side.
“For most brides, their wedding day flashes past in a blur, leaving them with a Sleeping Beauty sensation as they watch their wedding dress fade with age, never to be worn or enjoyed again. Our idea was to breathe some life back into your dress, and be photographed by Mark in a stunning portrait that speaks to who you are today,” says Westbrook.
Joy Whittaker was one of the first models, and loved the results. “The official photographer bombed out on my wedding day and I only had a few good pictures of my dress. So for our first anniversary I put the dress back on - well half back-on,” she laughs. “I had gained 6kg but with artful draping I did a tasteful voluptuous art-nude shoot and gave the best print to my husband as a gift. He loved it - it now hangs framed above our bed.”
Some of the wild ways wedding dresses have made their final appearances include in a mechanic’s workshop in a glory of grease, in the kitchen with a tomato pasta sauce and a husband in a nothing-butt apron, and an English bride floating in a lake like Hamlet’s Ophelia. The theme of a recent shoot was Hollywood, with the client wearing vintage lingerie.
“It’s a great chance to get different shots of yourself,” says recently-wed Trisha Brookes, who posed on the back of her husband’s Harley, with a trashed motel in the background in the style of Easy Rider. “Bike riding is a big part of our lives together and we wanted to document it in a different way.”
Enquiries have even been made by a divorced bride eager to set herself free from a controlling ex-husband by burning her wedding dress while dressed as Superwoman.
Think it and you can style and shoot it.
And if your wedding dress no longer fits or is stained or torn, Dirty Wedding Concepts can assist you with creative ways to rework the dress into an artistic and professional photograph. New dresses are also available.
A package costing R10 000 includes a pre-shoot meeting, theming and location planning, half-day outdoor shoot, including travel within the Joburg area, or studio shoot and on-site styling. You get a digital disc of the entire shoot and a photo book of printed images.
There are additional charges for make-up and hair stylist, travel expenses to distant locations, additional props and enlarged, A1-size framed images.
l To book, e-mail Mercedes on [email protected] or call her on 083 303 1403 - The Star