Not even an hour into her after-party, Kirra Bixby knew that she needed to cut off half of her wedding dress. Spilled champagne had mixed with dirt tracked in from the outdoor wedding venue, resulting in a layer of grime coating the dance floor. While none of the attendees in floor-length dresses were spared from dirty hems, Bixby’s white gown tracked mud like a Swiffer. “The bottom of it was black within 30 minutes,” she says.
Bixby, who wed her husband Zac Polmanteer last August, bought her wedding dress—a tiered ballgown—from Alena Leena, a Ukrainian designer who was forced to flee to Poland after the war broke out. Warned that the relocation might impact her order, Bixby pivoted, buying a backup dress, a slinky fit-and-flare from Grace Loves Lace. While her original dress ended up coming through, Bixby didn’t want her second dress to go to waste, so she decided to wear it during the reception and after party.
Both avid dancers, Bixby and Polmanteer arranged for guests to boogie late into the night at a local bar—but when Bixby made it onto the dance floor, she found herself constrained by her silky slip. Covered in mud and overheating from the raucous crowd, she decided the only solution was to chop her dress.
Luckily, she had an expert on hand: Polmanteer’s aunt, Mary Quigley, a producer and costume designer whose credits include The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and more. The ever-prepared Quigley, who always carries an emergency kit in her car, rushed off to grab her shears. But not everyone was so sure Bixby should cut up a multi-thousand-dollar dress.
“The bouncer at the bar actually really tried to convince me not to cut it,” she says. “I bantered back and forth with him, and I was like, ‘I’m never going to wear it again, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.’” So Quigley lopped off the bottom and they rejoined the party, dancing until the lights came on at 2 a.m.
After the wedding, Bixby took the dress to the seamstress who altered her other wedding dress to have it hemmed. “I think it’s much more wearable, because it’s not a full wedding dress now,” she says.
Brides aren’t just chopping their wedding dresses on their big days, either—some are taking shears to their hair as well in a trend that has been dubbed “the wife chop.” When Nadine Heffron got married in May, she and her husband, Thomas, whom she met in cosmetology school, knew that they wanted to do something with her hair to honor their relationship. “He was the one that suggested going that short,” Heffron says of her bob, which lands just above her shoulders. Heffron had no second thoughts about such a dramatic change, though the same can t be said for the groom. “He was more nervous about this because he was scared he was gonna cut it too short,” she says. “But I was so excited.”
The chop didn’t just offer a transition between the ceremony and reception, but a tender moment shared between bride and groom. “That was really the only time in the day that it was just the two of us and our photographer,” she says.
Heffron kept her haircut a secret from everybody, including her parents and bridesmaids. “We told everybody that we were going to take our solo pictures after the ceremony and before the reception,” she says. “So everybody just kind of went off and did their own thing, and then we went back to our Airbnb and did the haircut.” In order to achieve the dramatic chop, Heffron installed extensions to add length. “My actual hair wasn t that long, so I did decide to go longer with the extensions, knowing that we were going to cut it,” she says.
Although it took her guests a moment to notice the haircut on top of her outfit change, Heffron calls the surprise debut “the best reaction.” Now, three months later, she still loves her shorter do. “I’m gonna keep it that short for a while,” she says.
Now, it seems the mid-wedding chop is quickly becoming a trend. On TikTok, the hashtag #weddinghaircut is overrun with brides lopping off their hair between the ceremony and reception, as are videos of brides pruning their dresses (in most cases, the latter seems much more spontaneous). Beth Helmstetter, founder of Beth Helmstetter Events, sees these radical changes as symbolic measures. “Heading into a wedding and a marriage, it’s a fresh start,” she says.
Helmstetter has only seen brides cut their wedding dresses in situations like Bixby’s—out of necessity. “When I’ve seen that happen, it s been because a bustle breaks or something isn t going to plan or now they want to change their shoes, because their feet hurt,” she says. “They just really want to enjoy their night.”
TikTok content
Helmstetter also notes that post-pandemic, many brides are ditching wedding customs and doing things their way. “People are realizing the wedding doesn t have to look a certain way even more so than they ever did before,” she says. Bixby seconds this. “People of our generation are moving away from some of the more traditional things.”
Bixby looks back at her wedding day with no regrets. She hosted a large, community-oriented ceremony in Long Beach, becoming the fourth generation of her family to marry under the same tree. “But I’ve always dreamed of getting married on the beach,” she says. Thankfully, if she ever decides to do a vow renewal, she has the prefect dress.
