A wedding dress is a special and very carefully chosen gown. The design and fit of the dress are important, but aesthetics are just one of the aspects that makes a  wedding dress significant. The way the bride looks on her wedding day not only expresses what kind of woman she is but also shows what she wants to be in the following stage of life, as a wife. One should not only look charming and feel amazing in a wedding dress but it should also allow one to reach deeper levels of oneself, to feel confident and authentic and not as if playing some made-up fairytale princess.

Triin Kärblane

Triin Kärblane, the designer of an Estonian bridal fashion brand NYMF, believes that a wedding dress inheres not only a powerful symbolic meaning but also different feminine archetypes that, if you choose the right one, can help a woman to express her essence. In this article, she tells about her approach and about choosing the wedding dress as a transformative process that requires one to get to know oneself.

Bridal dress as a symbol for women

For me, dresses are not just practical pieces or beautiful body decorators, but through dresses, women could activate and express their feminine essence. And the more I understand that our life is full of rituals, the more I realize that the marriage ceremony is one of the most sacred and powerful rituals in our lives that could create the base of the whole marriage. So it’s very important for a woman to choose the right wedding dress for this ceremony.

The wedding is not a costume party where you can play somebody else for one evening, whether it’s a princess from your childhood memories, a model from a bridal magazine, or a character from your mother's or friend's unfulfilled dreams.

The bridal dress should maximally express just the bride herself. Her uniqueness. Who is she? What milestone has she reached in her life? What energies does she carry? What archetypes does she embody in herself? What kind of woman does she want to be next to her husband?

Choosing a dress is a powerful process

From my 15 years and more than 400 bridal dresses experience I can say that wedding planning is a symbolic journey of getting to know yourself as a woman. Be it conscious or unconscious. Even just scrolling on Pinterest, flipping through bridal magazines, or visiting salons is a constant asking of yourself — what do I like, what I don’t? Who am I, who am I not?

It is also fascinating to observe how much we are influenced by trends, by the opinions of our girlfriends, mother, and husband. How much we follow the traditions versus having the courage and freedom to choose unique solutions. What are our values for choosing a dress – renting, reusing, chasing the best prices, ordering online, shopping from the salon or choosing a bespoke (high-end) designer dress? And the reality checks between what she thought she would wear (who she thought she was) and her final dress (who she really is).

However she chooses to drive her journey, the most important thing is feeling when she puts on the dress. It’s not just about the fitting of the dress, and in most cases, the dresses are adjustable for the brides, but it’s about how the woman feels. Whether she recognizes herself in that dress or not.

You can tell it by her reaction. It's something the bride can't lie about.

Bridal dresses as archetypes

My opinion is that whether the woman recognizes herself in some dresses or not is very much connected with the archetype the dress carries and whether the woman is in contact with the same archetype in herself or not.

There are lots of different theories about female archetypes, their classifications, and their names. Starting from the basic 4: The Maiden, The Mother, The Lover, and The Queen plus their shadow aspects or Tarot with much wider classification or different Goddess theories from different ancient cultures. Even my own creation has been an endless journey for discovering different feminine archetypes inside of me and expressing them in my collections. So I have built my theory and my classification and it grows continuously. But the basis of all the theories is the same – a woman is not just a woman. We have so many different female aspects within, some more active and some inactive that could be invoked.

For example, the most classical white bridal dress carries a fairytale princess energy – the princess who waits for the prince to save her. A very popular wedding theme involves this bohemian archetype. In NYMF bridal collections I have been expressing mostly free-spirited, playful, sensual, and loving energies, but also some mythical and divine qualities, so many of my bridal dresses carry different Goddess names and frequencies.

For me, these are the female qualities that women need to embody more next to their husbands. To be more balanced as a couple. Of course, women, especially mothers, and women in their self- realizations, should be also very practical ones and our modern world cultivates equality, but still, I believe that the feminine and masculine energies could dance better in their marriage if women embody more flowy, playful and sensual archetypes in their essence.

So my suggestion is for brides who start to choose their wedding dress, to ask themselves 3 questions:

• Who am I?
• What is my uniqueness?
• And what kind of woman do I want to be next to my husband?

Author: Triin Kärblane, NYMF Fashion Designer