Some of the most difficult things to find “green” for my wedding were the outfits for myself, my husband and the wedding party. A few eco-friendly wedding dress-makers are out there, and I tried on dresses from several of them for a previous blog post. I ended up wearing a dress by Lea-Ann Belter, a Canadian dressmaker who manufactures her dresses by hand in her Canadian studio. Though the silk dress didn’t feature organic material, it was a vast improvement over the majority of wedding dresses, which are manufactured under poor conditions in countries thousands of miles away.
Bridesmaid dresses were nearly impossible to find made with eco-friendly materials. Any I could find wouldn’t work with the design of the wedding. I decided the best I could do was to try to select dresses my wedding party would wear again. I chose Vera Wang’s bridesmaid dresses, and let each person choose her own style and color, provided they were within the color palette and the same length. I love the look of the mix-and-match dresses.
Finally, we went around and around on the men’s clothes and finally decided rental suits were the easiest, most affordable and most eco-friendly option. We asked the groomsmen, and they didn’t all have suits in one color, so they would have had to buy new. Renting reuses the same resources many times.
In the end, the clothing presented the most challenges, but I hope our choices made our clothing at least a bit lighter on the planet than it could have been.
