When Gemma Sort Chilvers first tried on her wedding dress from The Own Studio, she immediately fell in love with the minimalist silhouette. “It was elegant, had an ease to it, but [was] still bridal,” she recalls of trying on the drop-waist silk gown, featuring a full skirt and train.
The stylist and daughter of shoe designer Penelope Chilvers—who got married in Spain’s Costa Brava, near her family home, in September 2023—had her heart set on the style, partly because she knew she could rewear the dress beyond her big day. “I thought, ‘This would be so cool in another color,’” the bride says. “I already had it in mind that this wasn’t going to be a one-off dress.”
A few months after her wedding, Sort Chilvers started looking for someone to dye her dress—but struggled to find many services available. Eventually, she came across Nicola Killeen Textiles, which specializes in creating costumes for TV, film, theatre, and ballet. “I had to really twist their arm to do it for me,” she explains. “Obviously, a wedding dress is expensive, really sentimental, and things can go wrong in the dyeing process.”
Luckily, the stylist had some spare fabric for sampling, after taking the dress up to get rid of the train. “I’m so glad I was able to test it because the pink I originally chose was actually a bit brighter than I had envisaged,” she says. “We tested [another sample] with the correct color, saw that the dye took really well, and then just went for it. It came out amazingly.”
Sort Chilvers was so pleased with the final result—a baby-pink shade inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1999 Oscars dress—that she couldn’t wait to wear the dress again at the first opportunity: her friend’s wedding in Sicily, where many of the other guests recognized the gown. “They did a double take and were like, ‘No way—is that your wedding dress and you’ve re-dyed it?’ They thought it was amazing,” says the stylist, whose now husband Jake also rewore his wedding suit for the Italian nuptials.
