Cotton Wedding Dresses

Green weddings: how to get married ethically

03.12.10

We certainly know how to shop in the UK, just not sensibly and sustainably. Clothes prices have dropped by a quarter in recent years, fuelling a mad haberdash for the high street. Of the two million tonnes of clothing we buy every year, 74 per cent ends up in landfill.

Tradition used to dictate that wedding dresses ended up in mothballs, locked away in attics for the grandchildren to yawn over 30 years down the line. Those who buy into the once-in-a-lifetime view of weddings (in defiance of all statistics about divorce) tend also to demand dresses that see the light of day for precisely that amount of time too.

Instead of adding another prêt-a-chuck garment to the pile or consigning it to the attic, why not apply the hire-not-buy principle? Grooms hire their penguin suits, after all. With a multitude of shops renting out wedding dresses of all kinds, including designer brands, for a fraction of the cost of buying one, ethical brides can spend their hard-earned cash on other important aspects of the big day. Remember, a blowsy meringue need not be for life; or rather, not just for one person’s life.

Source: The Ecologist