WEDDINGS: Alternative Dress : Alternative Wedding Wear Takes the Cake
What exactly is alternative wedding wear?
“Something that breaks all the rules,” by artist Carol Booton’s definition.
As organizer of a recent “alternative wedding” fashion show at the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, it was Booton’s place to define her terms.
Her idea for some other bride’s dress is a fuchsia-colored bustier and red petticoat with red, ruffled undies showing through it.
‘Amazing Things’
“Women do amazing things to attract the opposite sex,” Booton notes, as if to explain her choice.
Other artists she invited to take part in her show have their own ideas about alternative-wedding wear.
“First you need an alternative attitude about things in general,” Barbara Benish believes. She is a painter who also designs a collection of T-shirts under the Ba-Ba label. To show that every bride is a complex character, Benish uses thrift-shop finds, Christmas tree lights and tacky, ethnic tidbits to build a two-changes wedding wardrobe in white, red and black. Wearing all three dresses to the altar requires a very long walk down the aisle.
“A woman is made up of complicated parts,” Benish says. “The white outfit represents the mother and virgin in a woman, black represents the witch and red the seductress.”
Film buffs might appreciate Carolyn Krause’s camera-ready costume. Her wedding dress is made of painted white film. She has made other dresses using footage from Three Stooges films. Actress and singer Grace Jones owns one of her hat designs, Krause says.
Likes the Unexpected
“I like the unexpected, and I haven’t really seen anything unexpected at any wedding,” Krause explains. Her dress, a backless, strapless design with a full skirt, is certainly not what most people would expect a bride to wear.
The fashion extravaganza of wedding alternatives is something called the “Sacrificial Mermaid.” Stage set and costume designer Susan Nininger created it. Along with the bride’s mermaid costume, she crafted latex fish heads for the bridegrooms and a seafood-platter sort of litter for the bride to ride in.
All of this suggests that Nininger has some serious reservations about conventional love and marriage.
“A mermaid is a man’s fantasy,” she says. “She’s a costumed woman, a gift-wrapped woman. But what do you do with her, once you’ve got her?”
What’s the alternative?
