There seems to be a new trend going on with recently married brides and their wedding dresses.  Instead of deciding to store their dress as a keepsake for the future, or impossible dreams of having their daughters, if they had daughters, wear the dress, former brides are deciding there's many other things they can do with their wedding dresses.

One of those things is known as trashing the dress.  This seems like an odd concept, but what they'll do is either have a party where they'll go through the process of destroying the dress in some fashion, such as cutting it up or ripping it up, or they'll go out and do something outrageous in it like roll around in the mud and do many other things to it.

The reason it seems like a strange concept is because of how much many of these wedding dresses are.  It's hard to imagine that someone paid $2,000 for a wedding dress, only to destroy it afterwards.  Some brides who have been asked about this say that it's their way of breaking from the past.  Others say it's their way of releasing all the tension that led up to the wedding.  Either way, it seems like a strange thing to do to a wedding dress that, other than being used, still has a lot of functionality for someone.

For instance, something that's been going on for the last couple of years are people donating wedding dresses to organizations that work with the spouses of military personnel who are overseas in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  They collect these wedding dresses, and then have sales of the wedding dresses for these potential brides.  In some cases, the organizations will have drawings and donate the dresses for free to these women.  Either way, it's a more practical way to give back to someone else, and brides can also get a tax receipt for the donation.

Of course, if brides are looking to get rid of those wedding dresses, they could still think about selling them and getting at least a few dollars back from what they originally paid.  They could place an ad in the newspaper, or sell them at a consignment shop.  Many brides are putting their dresses up on eBay, while others are going through Craigslist.  Even selling a dress seems more of a giving thing than trashing a dress.

Overall, it's still the bride's decision what she wants to do with her dress afterwards.  And, at least she's doing something with it, rather than packing it away, never to be seen again.