Happily Ever After: The Bridal Gown Reimagined

Even before a single stitch of it materializes, the bridal gown carries a heavy emotional load. It carries dreams and hopes for an unwritten future of great love and blue skies, but sometimes, it will become the embodiment of letdowns, sorrow and broken hearts. The bride's dress vibrates between the edges of the ultimate dichotomy – Once and Forever. It is to be worn during a single night but also to be everlasting, to preserve that one night and to reanimate it. As a sentimental kept piece, often passed down as an heirloom, it also safeguards continuity.

The inner world of brides has always excited authors, artists, and fashion designers. The bride's dress and the emotional energy it is charged with allow a designer to express an uninhibited fantasy, one detached from everyday life and surrendering to the realm of dreams. The uniqueness of the pieces lies in freeing the designers from their top constraints: They were allowed to disregard comfort and practicality and were freed to envision their bride. The exhibition examined the bridal gown as a nexus of binary contexts and tensions: frailty and strength, sanity and madness, loving and smothering, religious and secular ritualism, norm and overstatement, balance and disproportion, love and loss, once and forever, memory and trauma, trash and decadence, black and white, child fantasy and reality. Happily Ever After is the time description that seals most fairy tales and represents an immortal, fantastic existence filled with clichés, where love's intensity is never-ending and continues to burn in our hurts for eternity.