I Thee Wed: A New Bridal Label Is Using Deadstock Fabric From a 300-Year-Old Mill Famous for Its Royal Ties 

A few years ago, Amy Trinh, a designer who’d cut her teeth with Louis Vuitton, Craig Green, and Stella McCartney, was busy planning her 2018 wedding. The biggest roadblock she hit was finding the right dress, one that actually spoke to her personality and personal style. Trinh also wanted a dress that she could wear again in the future, or deconstruct in order to create something entirely new and wearable. But alas, the bridal market didn’t offer her anything compelling. “I thought, Why isn’t there anything that feels personal?” Trinh remembers. After a long and unrewarding search online, she decided to phone her close friend and former Central Saint Martins schoolmate Evan Phillips. At the time, Phillips was working for Simone Rocha (formerly, he’d assisted Richard Quinn) and Trinh asked him if they could collaborate on her dress together. In the process, the pair began to talk more and more about what they saw as a huge gap in the ever-swelling bridal market as well as the huge waste factor in this part of the fashion industry. Along with Trinh’s avant-garde wedding gown, their label Wed was born.

“The concept of marriage has changed so much,” Trinh explains of their motivation to launch the business. “People are breaking from tradition totally or melding together different traditions and cultures in terms of the actual marriage and the wedding celebration. Yet, still, the clothes really haven’t evolved all that much.” Trinh and Phillips’s point of view for Wed—which is currently offers bespoke options in addition to seasonal collections that they purposely show during the ready-to-wear markets and not the bridal markets—involves subverting the detailing found on classic wedding gown designs. For example, their debut collection for spring involved blowing up traditional floral embellishments into 3D draping, as well as using sequins to exaggerate the bustling bow, which is typically used to hold up a train. For fall 2020, which they are showing today by appointment in Paris, the black-and-white collection of dresses feature knotted-bow appliqués with unconventional draping of taffeta.

Trinh and Phillips aim to use as much upcycled fabric as they can, and for this most recent outing, they got a lucky break in that regard. Last year, they began working with Trino Verkade, a founding trustee of the Sarabande Foundation, which was started by Lee McQueen in an effort to provide funding for graduate and postgraduate scholarships as well as fashion incubator spaces. Verkade introduced Trinh and Phillips to Stephen Walters and Sons, a 300-year-old family-run mill in England that once supplied silk jacquards for Princess Diana and Princess Anne’s wedding gowns. The mill happened to have a large quantity of leftover fabrics and was happy to allow Trinh and Phillips to use the scraps for Wed’s fall collection. Phillips says that “it’s amazing how many fabrics the mill has created over this long period of time and that a lot of it has just sort of sat there looking for some way to be used.” Phillips also notes that this was an especially great coup for them because these silks and jacquards can typically cost upwards of 80 pounds a meter, which is “nearly impossible for a young brand to buy and sustain a business at the very start.”

Trinh and Phillips hope to continue working with Stephen Walters and Sons down the line, but also offer a bespoke service in which clients can bring their mother or grandmother’s wedding gowns to Wed and have them recut or repurposed into a new dress. “We’d love to be able to offer this as a service because there are so many wedding dresses that are not being used,” Phillips says. “The way we speak about the ‘one dress’ or the ‘one-day dress’ needs to end. We want to show people that you can recontextualize your old wedding gown, or that deadstock fabric can be used to create a beautiful and different wedding gown.” Especially if the fabric has regal ties. As Trinh adds, “We loved the idea that for the fall collection, these same fabrics from the mill were used for Princess Diana’s gown,” Trinh notes. “We really just wanted to take these traditional materials and mess them up a bit.”