Bride-to-be Wants Dead Mother’s Hair Featured on Dream Wedding Dress

A 61-year-old British bride-to-be anonymously posted to a website specializing in original, handmade fashion items that she wanted a customized wedding dress accented with locks of her dead mother’s hair. The woman wanted the dress to be a recreation of her mother’s 1953 wedding dress and included a hand-drawn sketch of where she wanted her mother’s hair to be located on the garment.

She admitted that the request is “quite weird” but posted that she started to collect the hair before her mother died and now has a full box of hair. A BBC’s report said that in the 19th century it was not uncommon to mourn a loved one through locks of their hair, and that those living in the U.S. would make wreaths filled with locks of hair.

Alix Bizet, a designer who has made clothing with human hair, commented that the material is not that easy to work with. “Using human hair is often perceived as gross and unethical, due to the past history in Europe (the Nazis) but also because it has been associated with cannibalism,” she said. “All this said, hair is a highly emotional subject that for some people is closely linked to the identity of a person – like an extension of their existence. It can be almost spiritual.”

See Edmund DeMarche, Bride-to-be Wants Dead Mother’s Hair Featured on Dream Wedding Dress: Report, Fox, October 25, 2018.