By Jessica Abbey

Reporter

A wedding is one of the most memorable events in a person’s entire life.

In order to preserve these memories, many people choose to have an engagement photo shoot or hire a professional photographer.

Trashing the dress, however, is a new trend that is taking the place of more tradition wedding photography.

Trashing the dress is essentially a photo shoot after the wedding in which the bride and groom go get all dirty in the mud or play paintball with one another in their ceremony clothing.

Afterward the wedding dress is absolutely covered with dirt or an arrangement of crazy colors, and the couple can take some really fun pictures.

This ruins the dress, however, because those stains will never come out.

This trend should end because it destroys the meaning of the wedding dress.

Wedding dresses are usually white in order to symbolize the purity of the bride who wears it. However, covering it in dirt of paint is an absolute mockery of this idea.

A wedding dress should remain in its original white state as a reminder of the ideals that it represented on the wedding day. Putting mud or paint all over the dress is quite frankly offensive to the idea of purity and almost seems to suggest that the marriage is designed in order to destroy this purity.

A wedding dress is also something which a mother sometimes passes down to her daughter.

Trashing the dress doesn’t even allow the opportunity for a dress to be reused and destroys the opportunity for it to be a part of a family tradition.

Supporters of the “trash the dress” trend would argue the dress is only worn once, so it should be used to its fullest potential.

Also, even if one decides to keep the wedding dress, it would probably just sit in the back of the closet in a box that collects dust forever anyway. Supporters of the trend would argue that we might as well get some really awesome pictures taken with the dress covered in multi-colored paint.

Similar to a wedding dress, though, many brides choose to preserve their wedding bouquets for years.

They don’t burn them after the wedding, which is what they might as well do with a wedding dress that is covered in mud.

It is the extent to which the destruction of the dress occurs that is a problem and is really just offensive.

A wedding dress kept in its original condition after a wedding ceremony is not useful for practical purposes unless it is passed down to another generation. However, the dress serves an emotional purpose because it preserves the memories of what a bride wore on her wedding day.

A bride doesn’t wear a dirty dress to walk down the aisle, so the trend of trashing the dress shouldn’t put a smudge on the memory of the special moment in which two people said “I do.”

Jessica Abbey is a junior journalism and Spanish double major from Cypress. She is a reporter for The Lariat.