Happily Ever After: The Bridal Gown, Reimagined

Holon, Israel, 2013

Curated Exhibition: Happily Ever After: The Bridal Gown, Reimagined
Even before a single stitch of it materializes, the bridal gown carries with it a heavy emotional load. It carries dreams,

hopes for an unwritten future of great love and blue skies even as often it will serve as the embodiment of letdowns,

sorrow and broken hearts.

The bride 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 is also to safe-guard continuity.

The inner world of brides has always excited authors, artists and above all, fashion designers.

The bride dress and the emotional energy it is charged with allow a designer to express an uninhibited fantasy,

one detached from the daily mundane and surrendering to the realm of dreams.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER seeks to examine, through Fashion, 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 adult reality.

The exhibition pieces were created by fashion designers whose majority focus on wedding dresses.

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 own bride.

Happily Ever After, that description of time sealing most fairy tales, represents an immortal, fantastic existence,

one filled with clichés, where love’s intensity is never ending and continues to burn in our hurts for eternity.

The exhibition seeks to tap into this eternal pool of love.