This bride dyed her wedding dress pink – and wore it as a guest at her friend’s wedding
When Gemma Sort Chilvers tried on her wedding dress from The Own Studio for the first time, she immediately fell in love with the minimalist silhouette. “It was elegant, had a certain lightness, but was still like a wedding dress,” she remembers trying on the silk dress with a low waist, full skirt and train.
Stylist and daughter of shoe designer Penelope Chilvers – who married in September 2023 on Spain’s Costa Brava, near her family home – fell in love with the style, partly because she knew she could wear the dress again after her big day. “I thought, ‘This would be so cool in a different color,'” says the bride. “I knew this wasn’t going to be a one-off dress.”
A few months after her wedding, Sort Chilvers was looking for someone to dye her dress – but it was difficult to find many suppliers. Eventually she came across Nicola Killeen Textiles, which specialises in making costumes for television, film, theatre and ballet. “I really had to talk the arm out of them to do it for me,” she explains. “Of course, a wedding dress is expensive, has a lot of emotional value and a lot can go wrong with the dyeing process.”
Luckily, the stylist had some fabric left over to test after lifting the dress to remove the train. “I’m so glad I was able to test it because the pink I originally chose was actually a little lighter than I imagined,” she says. “We tested (another sample) with the right color, saw that the color took really well, and then just went with it. It turned out amazing.”
Sort Chilvers was so pleased with the end result – a baby pink shade inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1999 Oscar dress – that she couldn’t wait to wear the dress again at the first opportunity: her friend’s wedding in Sicily, where many of the other guests recognized the dress. “They did a double take and said, ‘No way – is that your wedding dress and you’ve re-dyed it?’ They thought it was fantastic,” says the stylist, whose now-husband Jake also re-wore his wedding suit for the Italian wedding.
