Wedding Table Centerpieces

Their weddings dresses might have hung in a closet, never to be worn again. But that just would not be as much fun. "Trash the dress" or "rock the frock" are new terms for a trend that's's spreading rapidly through the web.

Trash the dress, AKA intrepid bridal or rock the frock, is a style of wedding photography that contrasts elegant clothing with an environment in which it is out of place. It is in general shot in the style of fashion and glamour photography. Sometimes brides decide to have pictures taken on a beach, but other locations include city streets, rooftops, rubbish dumps, fields, and deserted buildings.

Some sources claim the trend was originally started in 2001 by las vegas wedding shutter-bug John Michael Cooper. However, the idea of destroying weddings dresses has been utilized in Hollywood symbolically since at least October 1998 when Meg Cummings of the show sunset Beach ran into the sea in her wedding dress after her wedding was badly interrupted. No longer are weddings dresses remaining castaways in trunks, closets or basement storage rooms. Women are donning their weddings dresses again and trashing them in the most weird of ways.

It's the sort of idea that brought three best mates to a Peterborough auto wreckers yard. With their hair styled, makeup done and a professional snapper to boot, the three former Peterborough ladies put on their white dresses and descended on McIntyre Auto Wreckers on Keene Rd.

Sonya Jamieson, thirty, Shannon Pickard, 33, and Deanna Chisholm, 33, wanted "one more go" with their weddings dresses. "How often do three best friends get to wear their weddings dresses together?" Pickard declared. The three were not trashing their dresses, but they were racking up some costly dry cleaning bills walking around in the mud. The concept was about reliving their weddings days and getting another use of the dresses before the three move onto different chapters in their lives, Jamieson asserted.

Among the posy photographs and puffed-up bios that comprise the wedding statement section of sunday Times Style Section, there was an engaging article on the rising trend of supposed Trash the Dress wedding photography.

Trash the Dress, you say?

It's precisely what it sounds like -- following the blessed event, the bride straps on that gorgeous dress once again for a last farewell photograph to the robe she spent a fortune to wear for one day only. Only instead of posing in some predictably idyllic setting, the picture is shot in a scroungy back alley or a mossy lake.

These supposed Trash the Dress footage became all the rage with brides who want to add something novel to their wedding albums. And novel they're -- particularly the photograph at right in which a bride has set her wedding robe flaming, a la Joan of Arc. This shot was taken by a paparazzo named John Michael Cooper, who coined the phrase Trash the Dress.