Eternal Love Wedding Ensemble

Eternal Love Wedding Ensemble (2012)

Silk, wool and metallic; couture construction with French Alençon lace and Akoya pearls
couture assistance from Sharon Bell

This wedding ensemble began as a thought experiment. In 2009, I attended a workshop on fabric design and decided to challenge myself with the most ambitious thing I could imagine: a handwoven wedding dress. (I was not engaged at the time.)

I envisioned the coat with a ribbon of Chinese double-happiness characters running down the front. This character represents married bliss – the word for happiness, written twice and merged into a single character, representing two happy lives merged into one. The body would contain Tibetan eternity knots, and the dress would be woven in a three-strand braid, representing eternity in Celtic lore. The symbolism was layered across three cultures, three traditions for wishing a marriage well.

When I blogged about the project, my partner read it and said, “You know, I really wouldn’t mind being married to you.” The dress that had been purely theoretical suddenly had a deadline.

What followed was a year of intensive work: a thousand hours of weaving, sampling, fitting, and couture sewing (mostly by hand). With Sharon Bell, a former couturier and fashion school professor emerita, I created two garments, an exquisite coat and dress.

The finished ensemble isn’t just a garment. It is a meditation made incarnate. With each stitch, I contemplated the relationship, our upcoming marriage, and eternal love.

The dress is now part of the permanent collection at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, and was exhibited there in 2026. It was also exhibited at the American Textile History Museum in 2013.