"If you've been a 'Bridezilla' or were really stressed out during the wedding, it's a great way to let go and show you are not taking yourself so seriously," said Heather Levine, senior fashion editor for TheKnot.com. "Plus, some brides feel if they made this commitment to their husband for the rest of their lives, they won't need that dress again anyway."
A recent poll on the wedding website found that 11 percent of brides were opting to "trash the dress" - as it's come to be called - instead of preserving or selling it. Shoots start around $500 but additional fees kick in for albums or prints, and sometimes women buy a secondhand or cheaper gown for the occasion if they don't want to put their actual dress at risk.
But other women are outright bold.
In September, Minerva Mneimneh and her husband, Nabil, took trash the dress to a fiery extreme in a graffiti-covered abandoned building outside Center City. Just after sunset, Mneimneh hung her strapless wedding gown from a rope, donned a black corset and fishnet stockings. Then, with a few cracks of a fire-lit whip, she set the white dress ablaze. The newlyweds cuddled in front of the satin-fueled bonfire and even roasted marshmallows in the flames.
"Our wedding was pretty much a normal, run-of-the-mill wedding, and our photos were pretty classy - regular wedding stock," said Mneimneh, a 39-year-old project manager from Lake Hopatcong, N.J. "We wanted to do something that would show a little more of our personalities."
Although the marshmallows were too charred to eat, the couple said they will always relish the memories of their early days of marriage through the photos taken by Mike Allebach of Allebach Photography in West Norriton.
