Something Borrowed, Something Circular
How I'm dressing three weddings — without only buying new
I’m getting married three times.
Not because the first one didn’t take, but because love, apparently, doesn’t compress neatly into a single afternoon. There’s a civil ceremony in Miami, a Greek Orthodox ceremony in Johannesburg, and a big reception on a private game reserve in Bela-Bela, surrounded by bush and sky and the kind of silence that makes vows feel weightier. Three events. Three countries (well, two, but the game reserve might as well be its own universe). Three outfits.
When I started planning, I didn’t set out to make a statement about sustainability. But somewhere between the first venue call and the third dress consultation, I noticed something: every choice I was gravitating toward had a story that didn’t start with me. A dress worn before. A designer whose ethos is built on less. A gown that had already lived a life before finding its way into mine.
It turns out, without entirely meaning to, I was building a circular wardrobe for the most documented days of my life.
The wedding industry has a waste problem, and a creativity problem
Let’s start here, briefly, because it matters.
The average wedding dress is worn once. One day. Then it goes into a box, sometimes preserved, sometimes not, and spends the next several decades taking up space in someone’s childhood bedroom. In the UK alone, it’s estimated that around 4 million wedding dresses sit in storage, unworn. In the US, the number is far higher. The bridal industry is worth over $32 billion globally, and much of that value is premised on newness, on the idea that your dress must be untouched, unshared, unprecedented.
But circularity is quietly disrupting that logic. Pre-loved bridal platforms are growing fast. Designers are building rental and resale into their models. Brides are borrowing from friends, reforming heirloom pieces, hunting sample sales. The idea that a dress carries someone else’s joy, and that this is a feature, not a flaw, is gaining ground.
I didn’t set out to be a case study in any of this. But here I am.
Dress one: The civil ceremony, Miami
The first wedding is the quietest. A civil ceremony, intimate, legal, ours. For this one, I turned to Reformation.
If you know Reformation, you know that sustainability isn’t a footnote in their brand story. It’s the whole architecture. They publish their environmental impact by garment. They use deadstock and low-impact fabrics. They’ve built a brand that makes you feel like dressing well and doing less harm are the same act, because increasingly, they are.
I’m not going to describe the dress yet. That feels like giving away the ending of a chapter I haven’t finished living. But I will say this: choosing Reformation for a civil ceremony felt right in the way that small, true things feel right. Understated. Intentional. A beginning.
Dress two: The Greek Orthodox ceremony, Johannesburg
This one has a story I keep returning to, and not just because of the designer, though she is extraordinary.
Silvia Tcherassi is a Colombian couturier whose work sits at the intersection of romanticism and architecture. Her pieces are the kind you remember. The kind that get passed down.
And that’s exactly what happened with this dress. It belonged to my best friend’s sister. She wore it first, carried her own moments in it, and then my best friend passed it on to me.
There’s a word in circular economy thinking: recirculation. The idea that value doesn’t end when an object’s first use does, that things can move between people, accumulate meaning, and continue to matter. I don’t think anyone in that chain was thinking about supply chain theory. They were thinking about love. About the specific generosity of women who share things that matter with each other.
But that’s the thing about circularity that often gets lost in the business case version of the story: it’s not just environmentally intelligent. It’s emotionally intelligent. Wearing a dress that already holds a history, especially the history of people you love, adds a layer to the day that no amount of money spent on something new can replicate.
Walking into a Greek Orthodox ceremony in Johannesburg, in a dress that traveled through two women before reaching me, feels like exactly the right kind of inheritance.
Dress three: The big reception, Bela-Bela
The third dress has a different kind of story, and I’m not ready to tell all of it yet.
What I can tell you is that it’s from Find Bridal in Miami, a sample dress from Amsale’s 2019 collection. For those unfamiliar, sample dresses are the gowns that bridal boutiques use for try-ons. They live on the rack, travel from show to showroom, are tried by dozens of brides who didn’t choose them, and are eventually sold at a significant discount, or in worse cases, discarded.
Amsale herself was a pioneer. An Ethiopian-American designer who almost single-handedly popularized the minimalist bridal gown in the 1980s, she built a house known for clean lines and quiet elegance. A 2019 sample from her collection isn’t just pre-loved. It’s a piece of bridal history.
But the circularity of this dress is only part of what makes it the one. There’s a longer story here about how this dress found me, the coincidences that kept stacking up, the feeling that it had been waiting. I’ll share all of that properly when the time comes, because it deserves its own telling.
For now: I’m not going to describe it. You’ll have to wait.
What I will say is that finding a sample dress rather than ordering new meant that something beautiful continued its journey instead of ending its story on a sale rack. That feels right for a reception on a game reserve, where the whole point is to be inside something larger and older than yourself.
What this actually looks like in practice
One of the things I want to demystify about circular fashion, especially for weddings where the stakes feel so high, is that it doesn’t require sacrifice.
I didn’t compromise on beauty. I didn’t compromise on meaning. In fact, every single one of these dresses carries more meaning than something I could have ordered new from a bridal catalogue. The story is part of the dress. The history is the point.
Here’s what circular bridal dressing actually looks like, from where I’m standing:
It can be a brand choice. Reformation exists. There are others. You don’t have to give up beautiful, well-made clothes to make a different choice about where they come from.
It can be a gift from someone you love. If you have a friend, a mother, a sister with a dress that meant something, ask. You might be surprised what they say.
It can be a hunt. Sample sales, pre-loved bridal platforms, vintage shops. The dress that was made for someone else might be the one that was made for you.
To be continued
Here’s what I know so far: I wore the first dress in Miami, and it felt like the right beginning.
The Greek Orthodox ceremony in Johannesburg is ahead of me. The bush reception in Bela-Bela is ahead of me. Two more dresses, two more stories, two more days that will only happen once.
I’ll be writing about both as they happen, the dresses, the moments, the entirely non-linear experience of getting married across two continents and three ceremonies. Consider this the first dispatch.
The only thing I can promise you is that nothing I’m wearing was made only for me. And somehow, that makes all of it feel more mine.