If you're someone who gets emotional at the sight of a bride-to-be sauntering down the aisle in her pristine white dress, have a box of Kleenex at the ready.
Many women wear a piece of sentimental jewellery as their "something borrowed" on their wedding day, but one young bride-to-be brought her guests to tears by wearing her grandmother's 55-year-old wedding dress, Inside Edition reported.
23-year-old Jordyn Cleverly, from Boise, Idaho, decided in secret to wear the same long-sleeved lace gown that her widowed grandmother, Penny Jensen, 74, wore to marry her high school sweetheart in 1962 – and luckily, photographer Kortney Peterson captured the reveal for us all to see.
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Cleverly didn't tell Jensen, whose husband passed away before her granddaughter was born, about her decision until the rehearsal dinner two nights before the wedding. “I didn’t want her to see it for the first time walking down the aisle and just start sobbing and all those memories come back to her,” Jordyn told Inside Edition.
Cleverly decided to wear the vintage gown when, like many brides-to-be, she couldn't find The One when dress shopping. “After our engagement, I tried on a couple of dresses at a local wedding dress shop and I just couldn’t find anything that had the style, that antique vintage style that I was looking for,” she said.
When she found out her grandmother was planing on donating her old dress to charity, Cleverly was inspired to try it on. “It was actually maybe a size or two too big and so I contacted a local seamstress to see if there was anything we could do with it and she said, ‘Absolutely, it’s in fantastic shape,'" she said. “[My grandma] had zero idea; she had no idea it was even in my possession."
Cleverly, who first met her then fiancé, Dakota Cleverly, aged just 14, said her grandmother was speechless when she saw her, describing the experience as an "emotional rollercoaster". "All I heard her saying in the back was, ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ I finally went up and hugged her and she whispered in my ear, 'I married my high school sweetheart in this dress and so will you'."
Peterson, the photographer, posted the images to the Love What Matters Facebook page, describing it as, "a first look unlike any other I've done before". "The bride secretly got her widowed grandma's dress from 1962, and is wearing it for her big day. Grandma had zero idea! Yes. You guessed it. I bawled." Who wouldn't?