A Bride and Her Bows
By Mia Serrano-Salow
The right wedding dress doesn’t necessarily make you feel like a different person. Sometimes, it makes you feel more like yourself. For Claire, a vintage wedding dress was the obvious choice.
“I pretty much always have at least one vintage piece in any given outfit, so a vintage wedding dress felt like a no-brainer. I also tend to get dressed– I mostly wear skirts, I usually have a little heel going, I wear collared shirts and blazers to my super casual publishing job, silk scarves, costume jewelry, the whole bit. It felt right that my wedding dress was maximalist– ruffles, bows, lace, train etcetera- because that’s how I always dress!”
Photo by Paige O
The dress had eight bows, four on either side, beginning at the waist and ending at the hem. It was a detail that felt particularly personal, rooted in a childhood love that never really went away.
“I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life thinking about bows,” she says. Her mother used to pick out beautiful ones for her and her sisters, and she still remembers “her cutting them with the nice sewing scissors we weren’t allowed to use.” She wore bows in high school, “way, way before that was cool again,” and even after she stopped wearing them in her hair, she continued moving her bag of bows from apartment to apartment.
Naturally, the bows made their way into the rest of the wedding. “I loved the bows on my wedding dress so much that I ended up throwing a lot more bows into the mix for the wedding decor…bows on me, bows on flower girls, bows on napkins, bows on vases, bows on bows on bows.”
Photo by Paige O
Finding the dress, however, was not a process she initially expected to enjoy. She went to four or five appointments, including two at Allegra Vintiij, where she eventually found the one. “It was such a pleasure to rely on the expertise of the women at the vintage bridal shops,” she says, adding that it was “really, really fun to get to look at so many beautiful clothes.”
Each appointment taught her something about her own preferences. But when she tried on the dress she eventually chose, the feeling was immediate.
“It felt like a key in a lock.”
Photo by Paige O
The dress needed alterations, and she immediately felt comfortable trusting Paloma with something so important. “It was like she could read my mind!” she says. “She did beautiful work—it fit me like a glove.”
Photo by Paige O
With five older siblings, she says there is a degree to which you always feel like the little sister, “no matter how old you are or what kinds of grown up choices you’re making. After we got engaged, I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to get married. The last time I had skinned my knees and elbows was like a month before!”
She married in Spokane, Washington, her hometown, surrounded by friends and family who had traveled from across the country to be there.
“Our New York friends kept joking that it was a “destination wedding,” and still made it!”
But the moment she remembers most is a little less polished: three minutes before the ceremony, when her sister’s dress split down the back.
“It was utter chaos,” she recalls. Her mom was frantically hand-sewing, the photographer was handing her safety pins, and her sister-in-law was trying to figure out if anyone had a sweater. Her nieces, meanwhile, began carrying her train “like the little birds in Snow White.”
When asked what she hopes to remember most about how she felt in her dress, she answers simply:
“That I felt like myself!”
