A Little Dip’ll Do Ya

For some 21st-century brides, it’s all about drowning the gown

By Timothy R. Schulte
CTW Features

There goes the bride: Jaime Cerullo trashes her dress with husband Chris. Photo courtesy of Clare Norton Photography

Taffeta, tulle, chiffon and charmeuse are words often associated with wedding gowns. Waterproof? Not exactly. But that’s not stopping brides from drenching the dresses of their dreams.

In a new take on “From Here to Eternity,” where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr embrace passionately on the beach as the surf rolls around them, brides everywhere, with an accomplice photographer, are heading to the water to “trash the dress.”

“Now that I have these pictures I wouldn’t trade them for anything,” says Jaime Cerullo, a bride in Portland, Maine, who gave her dress the water treatment after her September 2007 wedding and has the photos to prove it. “I wasn’t looking to absolutely destroy the dress. I was looking for some fun, informal pictures that I didn’t get to take with [husband] Chris on the wedding day.”

A week after the wedding, their photographer, Clare Norton, snapped photos of Jaime and Chris decked out in their wedding attire next to a lighthouse, along a coastline walkway – and eventually in the Atlantic Ocean.

“I was really looking for somebody who would not worry about the dress,” says Norton, who runs Clare Norton Photography in Portland. “She was a huge sport about it.”

“Trash talking” is commonplace on bridal forums these days, and the chatter has been amplified by the “Trash the Dress” blog run by Louisiana photographer Mark Eric. There, photographers from all over the globe post artfully framed images of brides captured in the act of “ruining” their gowns. And not all scenes are confined to the water. Wearing wedding finery, the women are photographed sitting on grimy fire escapes, stretched out full length in the surf, twirling dreamily in abandoned buildings or perched in dead trees. One woman stands, inexplicably, on top of a round table, her back to the camera.

A widely held notion about dress trashing is that it symbolizes a woman’s commitment to her new husband. Most dress trashers, though, say it’s just fun. Photographers, meanwhile, have been happy to jump on the bandwagon.

“As a photographer, you want to do so much with your couples,” Norton says. “If you have somebody who’s fun and wants to do those things, it lets me be creative.”

Some trashed dresses survive the degradation. A number of charities accept donated gowns – fresh from the cleaners, of course. Brides Against Breast Cancer resells good-as-new gowns to support the Making Memories organization. If children are in her future, Cerullo plans to have a seamstress convert her dress into christening gowns. For now, though, she’s keeping the gown handy for whenever she gets the itch to slip back into it for a sentimental moment.

The Maine bride says the gown-trashing ritual definitely isn’t for everyone, but her fully dressed dip in the ocean couldn’t have turned out better.

“It was perfect weather, and the water was a lot warmer than I thought,” she says.

Now, Norton’s looking into how she can keep up the fun well into winter.

“One of the couples wants to do ice skating and sledding [engagement photos],” she says. “I’m going to talk to them about trash-the-dress sledding!”

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