Would You Wear a 380-Pound Wedding Dress?

Courtesy of Gail Be Designs

People have been oohing and ahhing at wedding dresses for centuries. Whether it was Queen Victoria’s white dress which kicked off the white wedding gown trend we still follow today, Kate Middleton’s Grace Kelly-inspired gown, or even Solange Knowles recent jumpsuit wedding-day look, designers continue to create jaw-dropping styles for brides and their guests to marvel at, but no one could have imagined the beaded masterpiece that one dressmaker from Edina, Minnesota crafted.

A pure labor of love, Gail Be, set out to make the world’s largest, and heaviest at 380lbs, wedding gown, appropriately named Fantasy. Created over three years with the help of 22 seamstresses and one million beads, Be used 500,000 glass pearls and 400,000 crystals held together with seven miles of wire. She has all but assured herself a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Today’s bride, whether she is spending $1,500 or $15,000 on her wedding dress, wants to have a wedding-day look that reflects her personal style,” comments Terry Hall, Fashion Director at Kleinfeld, the famed bridal salon in New York. “And while Fantasy is very much a fantasy gown, there is a lot of inspiration brides can find from it, whether it be the silhouette, the pattern of the beads, or even the headdress.”

Courtesy of Gail Be Designs
 

An award-winning beader, whose work has been worn by none other than Lady Gaga, Be set out to create this one-of-a-kind wedding dress out of her own personal collection of beads. After losing her vision in the early 1990s, Be moved from bead weaving to bead collecting, but thanks to a corneal transplant and Lasik surgery, her vision came back and she could resume her passion.

So who is meant to wear this record-breaking dress? No one.

When Be set out to create the world’s grandest beaded wedding gown she knew it wasn’t for commercial use, and that a bride was unlikely to ever wear it. “It’s an art piece,” notes celebrity wedding planner Marcy Blum. “She set out to draw attention to her work, and she wouldn’t have gotten any press at all if it were just a tapestry.”