Wedding Dress Cleaning & Wedding Dress Preservation Omaha

Click a question to go straight to the answer.
Questions this article will answer for brides:

• Q1: How to clean my wedding dress?
• Q2: Should I try DIY wedding dress cleaning?
• Q3: What does preserving a wedding dress mean?
• Q4: Should I preserve my wedding gown?
• Q5: Where to clean a wedding dress, or get it preserved?
• Q6: What does it cost?

A1:

When you go to clean your wedding gown after the big day, without a doubt the only option you should consider is bringing your dress to a professional wedding dress cleaner who specializes in wedding dress cleaning.

The dry cleaner will carefully complete the wedding gown dry cleaning, taking into account the care label but also relying on their expertise and past experience to use the most appropriate processes ensuring the dress gets as clean as it can, and doesn’t get damaged. Dry cleaners take special care to not harm decorations like beading, crystals or jewels, embroidery, lace, or glitter. They can even remove some decorations, like beaded belts, to do the cleaning and then reattach them afterward.

But maybe you don’t think it’s worth the money to get your dress dry cleaned after your wedding? Maybe it doesn’t look all that dirty. We are here to tell you that just because you can’t see the stains, doesn’t mean they are not there. They will show up eventually, and when they do it might be too late to remove them. That’s because the longer a stain sits, the harder it is to get out. Wedding dress dry cleaning needs to happen ASAP after the wedding. This Facebook post with pics of one of our employees’ wedding dress shows what happens if you don’t clean your gown right away, because it doesn’t look dirty or you don’t want to spend the money. This dress did NOT look like that the day after the wedding, but in 4+ years’ time, yellowing occurred all over this dress from sweat and other invisible stains!

A2:

You should never, ever attempt to do DIY wedding gown cleaning. If you do, it could ruin your dress beyond repair. This is because most wedding gowns cannot be washed in water. Don’t risk it! Dry cleaning is a different process than the laundry we know and hate — it’s a cleaning process where water is not used. Instead a dry cleaner uses a specialized liquid soap solution to dry clean garments (so yes, using the word “dry” in the name is kind of misleading). Also, the decorations we mentioned above? Those can fall off or snag and rip the fabric if you cram the dress into your washing machine at home. Our dry cleaning machines are many times larger than your washer! The agitation of your washing machine is meant to make the fabric rub together to help remove dirt and stains. This is very bad for delicate items like wedding gowns.

A3:

Wedding dress preservation is a very specialized process that needs to be done by professionals. If you get your wedding gown preserved, you will get the dress back in a big box. (So sometimes it also gets called a “clean and box” process.) After the professional wedding dress dry cleaning is complete, to preserve the dress it will be carefully folded with acid-free tissue paper between the layers of fabric, and placed inside a sealed box that protects it from light, dust, pollutants and bugs.

Fun fact: the oxygen gets pumped out of the box, and it is replaced with an inert gas. This is so the dress won’t be vacuum-sealed and get crushed, but it also will not be exposed to oxygen, which can harm the dress over time. The box has a flap that opens like a book cover so you can view the bodice, but when the flap is closed it seals out all the light. UV is damaging to fabric, so keeping your dress in the dark box with the flap closed almost all the time is important.

A4:

Should you do wedding gown preservation? Yes! The reason we say this is because you may want to wear it later for a vow renewal ceremony, or a friend or family member could want to wear it in the future when they get married. You never know if that might happen, but if the dress is not preserved, at some point it literally can’t happen even if you want it to, because the dress will not look nice anymore. Preservation means you always have the option to reuse it. Not preserving takes that option away.

So hopefully now we’ve persuaded you that wedding dress cleaning after your wedding day is for sure not optional, and if you even maybe want to use it again in the future, wedding dress preservation is also what you should do.

Need more convincing? Check out this video from Nayri, a wedding fashion expert based in California.

A5:

So where should you go to dry clean your wedding dress, and to preserve it? You can bring your gown to any Max I. Walker location. We partner with professional wedding dress cleaners based out of Minnesota, who clean literally thousands of wedding gowns every year so they are absolute experts. No appointment necessary — you can just drop it off any time during our normal business hours. You will need to pay a 50% deposit of the estimated total for the service you choose. Wedding dress preservation will take several weeks to be completed. Make sure you give us your cell phone number or email address when we create an account for you, so we can text or email you the moment the dress is back and ready for pickup.

A6:

Want to know the cost for our wedding gown services? Visit our wedding gown services page to use our price calculator and see about what you can expect to pay for the service you choose.

Photo Credit:
Freepik