Preserving Your Wedding Dress: How To Keep It Good As New In Storage

Posted on: 14 December 2015

Whether you're moving or simply running out of space, putting your wedding dress into a storage unit can be nerve-wracking. To avoid damage to your wedding gown and ensure it stays beautiful and clean for years to come, consider the three tips listed below.

Have Your Dress Professionally Preserved

While professional cleaning may be enough for certain dress materials, other materials, such as silk, need a bit more care in order to prevent yellowing and staining.

Beyond cleaning, professional wedding dress preservationists ensure that your dress is properly stored so as to avoid mold and mildew, burrowing by insects and vermin, and yellowing and age spots. It's a good idea to have this process completed as soon after the wedding as possible, so as not to allow old stains to set in further and new stains to emerge.

Choose the Best Storage Method

When keeping your dress in a storage unit, you're likely worried about space limitations. While hanging your dress in a plastic bag may seem less space-consuming, it can also cause damage to the dress.

If you had your dress professionally preserved, it's likely that it was packed into a box with a viewing window. A box, while it does take up more space, offers the best protection against aging, yellowing, and decay. Plastic bags have been known to cause irreversible damage to wedding gowns, due to the chemicals they emit over the years. If you must hang your dress, wrapping your dress in acid-free tissue paper and using a fabric bag would be your best option.  

Choose Climate-Control

You may not think that a wedding dress is a good environment for mold and mildew growth, but wherever there's moisture, mold and mildew are soon to follow.

A wedding dress packed haphazardly or openly in a storage unit with fluctuating temperatures and humidity levels will make the perfect environment for mold or mildew to settle in, leaving your dress irreparably damaged. Climate-controlled units allow you to pick the best temperature and humidity level to preserve your dress. Climate-controlled units not only offer protection against mold and mildew, but can also help to limit the amount of dust and dirt as they're tightly sealed and contained.

To learn more about proper wedding gown storage, speak with a preservationist. While storing your dress in a storage unit may not be your favorite option, climate-controlled units offer the best protection against damage and offer the greatest peace of mind. Visit the site of a storage company like http://www.bekins.com for more information about your options.

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