Dearly Beloved | 100 Years of the Wedding Dress

This exhibition features a selection of bridal wear from our collection, representing wedding fashion from the late 1800s and through the twentieth century. Discover the beauty and craftswomanship of home- or dressmaker-made garments, embellished by hand. With a focus on the wearers of these dresses and Aotearoa wedding traditions, we see how the wedding dress reflects changes in fashion – both in aesthetic style and our social customs.

Displayed across two exhibition spaces, Dearly Beloved also presents the Ashburton Bride of the Year 1970 winner’s gown – an unusual, though at the time, very contemporary wedding dress – alongside related objects and photographs from the Gordon Binsted negatives collection.

Image: Photograph, wedding of Elisabeth and Antony Quaid on 14 November 1992. AM&HS Collection; 05.2013.1033