Wedding Dress Restoration
Museum-quality restoration for wedding dresses 20 years and older — yellowed, stained, or fragile with age. Brought back to life by hand.
Restore Your Dress
Couples’ Choice Award
12× 
Best of Weddings (Hall of Fame)
There’s a particular bittersweet dread that comes with lifting the precious wedding dress of someone you love out of its box. A box that’s been closed for thirty years. The white you remember has gone dull and yellow. A stain you never noticed has bloomed across the bodice. Your heart sinks a little as you wonder: is it too late?
It’s almost never too late to restore a wedding dress. Every wedding dress yellows — it isn’t a matter of if, but when. The fibers are organic, and time slowly degrades them, pulling the brightness out and leaving yellow behind. But that damage can be undone, gently, by hands that have been doing this for over a century.
Restoration is how a forgotten dress becomes an heirloom again — clean, bright, and ready to be worn, cherished, or passed to a daughter who hasn’t met it yet.
If that’s the dress in your hands right now, discolored, yet still precious, you don’t have to decide alone. Send us a photo and we’ll give you an honest preliminary assessment of what’s possible. Whatever you decide, your dress is safe with us.
Before & After
Real restoration — decades of yellowing reversed. See more →
Real restorations — yellowing, stains, and decades of age, gently reversed.
When you trust us with something irreplaceable, you deserve to know exactly who’s caring for it. Here’s what stands behind every restoration.
Our restoration work is carried out through a state-of-the-art cleaning facility in continuous operation since 1913 — the heritage and science of a 100-plus-year-old craft, and the personal care of a team that has been doing this for generations.
Your dress is handled in-house by skilled technicians and seamstresses trained exclusively in bridal fabric care — never outsourced, never shipped on to a third party.
We’ve been perfecting the art of wedding dress restoration for over a century — handling some of the most delicate, intricate, and aged fabrics in the industry with the same care and precision you’d expect from museum textile conservators.
475+ verified 5-star reviews, 17× WeddingWire Couples’ Choice Award and 12× The Knot’s Best of Weddings Hall of Fame, and more than 3 million dresses cared for since 1913.
Our facility maintains Drycleaning and Laundry Institute (DLI) certification — the textile-care industry’s longest-running professional standards body. It requires ongoing technical training, equipment inspection, and adherence to industry-recognized best practices.
Wedding dress restoration — sometimes called wedding gown restoration — is a gentle process performed entirely by hand, specifically designed for dresses 20 years and older. It’s gentler and more precise than the museum-quality cleaning we use for newer dresses. Over several careful cycles, we lift decades of yellowing and set-in staining that ordinary cleaning leaves behind, and preserve your dress so it never yellows again.
The dividing line is usually age: how old is the dress? Aging is what causes the yellowing, oxidation, and fabric deterioration restoration is designed to treat — so most decisions land on the age axis. The exception is a newer dress that’s been stored poorly and already shows significant yellowing or set-in staining; condition can override age in cases like that. If your dress is in the gray area, send us a photo and we’ll tell you which service fits.
Restoration
Heirloom, vintage, or stored a long time? Restoration reverses the yellowing and brings the dress back to life.
Choose Your RestorationCleaning & Preservation
Cleaning and preservation is the right choice for most brides.
See Cleaning & PreservationStill not sure which service you need? Use our Help Me Choose tool — a one-minute walkthrough that points you to the right service for your dress.
We know handing something irreplaceable to a company you found online takes a leap of faith. So here’s exactly what happens, every step — insured and tracked the whole way.
Select your restoration service and place your order. Your shipping kit ships within 1–2 business days.
A free, prepaid, insured shipping kit arrives at your door in 4–5 business days.
Pack the dress and drop it at any FedEx. About fifteen minutes — we take it from there.
Eight to twelve weeks. Your dress moves through a careful sequence of hand-performed stages — inspection, spot treatment, cleaning, repair, pressing — each requiring the kind of skill and patience that can’t be rushed.
Your beautifully restored dress travels home to you, fully insured and ready for its next chapter.
Most restoration requests fall into one of six categories below. We handle all of them in-house with our skilled technicians and seamstresses trained exclusively in bridal fabric care — no third party, no shipping your dress to another facility.
The most common request. Decades-old yellowing from perspiration, sugar, and oxidation pulled out of the fabric through multiple gentle hand-cleaned cycles — not aggressive bleaching that destroys silk.
Wine, cake icing, makeup, mud, champagne, rust, and dye-transfer stains that have had years (sometimes decades) to set into the fabric. Removed where possible and lightened in the cases where complete removal isn’t possible.
Lace mended by hand using period-appropriate repair techniques. Missing sections can usually be filled or matched with replacement lace sourced from our textile archive.
Beads, pearls, sequins, and crystal trim re-secured one piece at a time. We match replacement beads to the original where any have been lost over the years.
Torn seams, loose hems, separated bodice work, brittle netting, and damaged underlayers repaired before cleaning. We restore the structure first so the cleaning step doesn’t cause further damage.
The most rewarding work we do. Mom’s or grandma’s dress restored, refit if needed, and preserved so it’s ready for the next wedding day. If your daughter’s wedding is on the horizon, we recommend reaching out at least 4–6 months before the ceremony to allow plenty of time.
Same gentle, 100% hand-cleaned restoration either way, by the same specialists. The difference is insurance, chest finish, and finishing touches.
Perfect For: Heirloom dresses 20+ years old, originally priced under $2,000.
Perfect For: Couture heirloom dresses 20+ years old, priced over $2,000.
Planning on wearing the dress again soon? Clean-Only with Restoration ($360.00) reverses yellowing the same way and returns your dress on a premium hanger in a garment bag (steam pressing before wearing is recommended as some wrinkling may occur during shipping) — without the preservation chest.
Based on our experience restoring dresses from every decade since the 1900s, we have found that most dresses can be significantly improved — though the extent of what can be achieved with professional restoration depends on the condition of each dress.
Our skilled technicians and seamstresses assess every dress by hand when it arrives. We’d rather tell you upfront if there are any issues with cleaning your dress safely than deliver a disappointing result. If your dress arrives and cannot be safely cleaned for any reason, you will be contacted and offered a full refund.
Usually, yes. Most dresses come dramatically closer to their original appearance with our delicate yet thorough restoration process. On heavily aged fabric, full reversal isn’t always possible; deep-set yellowing and stains can bond into fibers over time. Our skilled technicians will do their absolute best to restore your dress as close to its original beauty as possible.
Restoration is designed for dresses 20 years or older. After two decades, even carefully stored dresses tend to show yellowing, oxidation, and fabric deterioration that cleaning and preservation alone can’t fully address. Under 20 years, cleaning and preservation is usually the right path.
Yes — vintage dresses from the 1950s, 60s, and earlier are some of the most rewarding restorations we do. We’ve restored dresses from every decade since the early 1900s. Older fabric needs several gentle hand-cleaning cycles and careful repair, but decades of yellowing and age can usually be reversed. Send us a photo and we’ll give you an honest preliminary assessment of what’s possible.
It comes down to age. If your dress is under 20 years old, cleaning and preservation is usually all it needs. If it’s 20 years or older — or already yellowed, stained, or fragile — restoration is the gentler, more thorough process built to reverse that aging before preserving the dress. Not sure? Help Me Choose narrows it down in about a minute.
Two services — Traditional Restoration at $460 and Celebrity Restoration at $535. Both include free insured shipping and minor repairs at no charge; anything beyond minor is quoted for your approval first. If you plan to wear your dress again soon or sell it, Clean-Only with Restoration is $360.
Most restorations take about 8–12 weeks from when we receive your dress — older fabrics need several gentle hand-cleaning cycles, and careful repairs take time to do right. If you have a deadline, tell us up front and we’ll do everything we can to meet it.
Minor repairs — a loose bead re-secured, a small hem touch-up, a minor seam re-stitch — are included in the base price. Larger jobs (extensive lace reconstruction, large areas of missing beadwork, structural rebuilding) are quoted for your approval before any work begins.
Yes — shipping is always free and fully insured with all of our services: the shipping kit to your door, your dress to our facility, and your finished dress back to you.
Yes. If you plan to wear your dress soon, Clean-Only with Restoration ($360) reverses yellowing and refreshes the fabric the same way our full restoration does, then returns your dress on a premium hanger in a garment bag — without the preservation chest. We recommend a light steam press before wearing, since some wrinkling can happen in shipping.
Expert restoration, free insured shipping, a 100-year anti-yellowing guarantee.
Affordable Preservation Company is now The Wedding Dress Preservation Company — same museum-quality cleaning and preservation, same written 100-year guarantee. Welcome to our new and improved website!
