The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is Trashing Your Wedding Dress a Radical Form of Self-Expression?

By DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

Yesterday, the Today show featured a segment on a new trend for the modern day radical bride: trashing the dress. According to the clip, the cooler brides among us are destroying their wedding dresses post-ceremony, whether through a paintball fight or a four-wheeler ride across swampy grounds, as a form of creative self-expression.

One bride, still donning her untouched white satiny number, tells the camera that weddings are so “formal and traditional,” so not her, right before she and her husband dirty up their matrimonial garb in the desert dust. The photographer shooting them points out that it’s "a more creative way to express yourself ... in a way you can’t on your wedding day." And that’s when I got really irritated.

If being a prim, dressed-to-the-nines bride isn’t your “thing,” so to speak, why even have a formal wedding and spend gajillions of dollars on some silky fluff you’re just going to turn around and destroy? If there's anything worse in my mind than rampant wedding consumerism, it's intentionally wasteful wedding consumerism  ... (Read more in DoubleX.)