Wedding Dress Cleaning
Museum-quality cleaning, acid-free preservation packaging, and a written 100-year anti-yellowing guarantee. One price from $260, the same for any size dress, with free insured shipping every step.
Clean My Dress
Couples’ Choice Award
12× 
Best of Weddings (Hall of Fame)
What It Is
Wedding dress cleaning and preservation is a two-part service: first your dress is cleaned with museum-quality equipment that lifts the invisible perspiration, oil, and sugar stains that cause yellowing, then it’s placed in an acid-free preservation chest that protects it from light, dust, and pests for the long term. Cleaning removes today’s stains; preservation protects against the next 100 years. You can do cleaning on its own, or cleaning plus preservation together.
Looking for wedding dress cleaning near you? There’s no need to find a local cleaner — we serve all 48 contiguous states, sending a free insured shipping kit to your door via FedEx and handling the rest.
You only get married once. The dress you wore that day carries memories no replacement can replicate — the way the light hit it during your first dance, the hug from your grandmother, the lipstick smudge from your maid of honor. We want you to be able to take it out in twenty, fifty, even a hundred years and see it the way it looked on you. That starts with cleaning it right. Three million brides have trusted the process since 1913 — you can read their reviews to hear directly from them.
It’s the invisible stains that ruin a wedding dress. Perspiration. Skin oils. Champagne and white wine that look clean today but oxidize into yellow blotches by next year. A spilled drop of clear soda. The sugar from cake icing that didn’t leave a mark but will surface as brown spots within months. None of these stains look like much in the moment — but each one is working against the fabric.
Bridal fabrics need specialized care most dry cleaners aren’t set up for: gentle solvents safe for silk, lace, and beadwork; UV stain detection; and acid-free preservation. A standard dry-clean process isn’t built around any of these.
That’s why we built a completely different process — the same approach museum curators use to care for historic textiles. And, surprisingly to most brides, ordering with us actually costs less than most local bridal-shop and dry-cleaner preservation — see how our pricing compares.
Our Cleaning Technology
SYSTEMK4 is the cleaning technology trusted by museum curators worldwide to care for historic dresses, ceremonial robes, and centuries-old textiles. Unlike traditional dry cleaning, SYSTEMK4 uses a modified hydrocarbon solvent that is gentle on delicate bridal fabrics, low-toxicity, environmentally responsible, fully biodegradable, and effective at lifting both visible and invisible stains.
The difference matters in three ways:
If you want the deeper science on how we use SYSTEMK4 alongside archival packaging and inspection protocols, our Technology page has the full walkthrough.
How It Works
Every dress that comes through our facility goes through six dedicated stations, each handled by a trained technician. We don’t batch-process — your dress is evaluated and treated on its own merits.
Your dress is examined under fluorescent UV light first. This reveals stains that are completely invisible in normal light — the sugar, oils, and protein residues that haven’t oxidized yet but will. Without this step, those stains go untreated and surface as yellow patches months later.
Identified stains are spot-treated by hand before the main cleaning process. Different stain types need different pre-treatments — protein stains (blood, perspiration, food) get one approach; tannin stains (wine, coffee) get another. Spot treatment makes the difference between a 95% and a 70% stain-removal rate.
Your dress is cleaned in the SYSTEMK4 solvent under careful temperature and agitation control. Delicate fabrics get reduced agitation; sturdier dresses can take a more thorough cycle. The technician monitors the entire process.
After cleaning, your dress is professionally pressed. Traditional Preservation dresses receive steam pressing. Celebrity Preservation dresses receive steam or hand pressing, depending on fabric — hand pressing is reserved for couture, silk, hand-set crystals, and fine lace where steam might be too aggressive; steam is used at the same Celebrity-quality standard for fabrics that benefit from it.
Loose beads are re-secured. Small tears are repaired by our in-house seamstresses. If your dress needs more substantial repair work, we’ll call you with a quote before doing anything.
Your cleaned dress is fitted onto an acid-free bust form and placed inside an acid-free preservation chest with a UV-protective viewing window and acid-free tissue. The chest is acid-free for long-term preservation.
Our success rate on wedding-day stains is around 95%. The most common stains we handle:
The honest part: about 5% of stains have already set into the fabric by the time we receive the dress — usually deeply oxidized stains from dresses that sat untreated for years before being sent in. If your dress is older or has visible damage, we’ll evaluate it on arrival and call you before doing anything you didn’t expect. No surprise charges. No surprise outcomes.
For dresses over 20 years old or those with significant yellowing, our Wedding Dress Restoration service goes deeper than standard cleaning. It’s a hand-process designed specifically for aged textiles.
This is the question we hear most. The short answer: cleaning removes today’s stains; preservation protects against the next 100 years.
Cleaning alone — even with SYSTEMK4 — gets your dress chemically clean and ready to wear or store. But without preservation packaging, the cleaned dress is still exposed to: light (which yellows fabric), oxygen (which oxidizes residual organics), acid (from ordinary cardboard, paper, or plastic), and airborne dust and pests.
Preservation places the cleaned dress inside an acid-free preservation chest with a UV-protective viewing window and acid-free tissue, on an acid-free bust form. It’s the same packaging museums use to protect ceremonial textiles for centuries. The cleaning makes the dress clean; the preservation keeps it that way.
For most brides we recommend both. If you plan to wear or sell your dress within the year (vow renewal, sale, a family member’s wedding), our Clean-Only service is the right fit. For everyone else, full preservation is the better long-term choice.
Pricing
Wedding dress cleaning starts at $260, and cleaning with preservation runs $360–$435 — one price for nearly every dress, with no surcharges for length, train, beading, or fabric. (Unusually large or heavily soiled dresses are the rare exception, and we’ll let you know before any work begins.) Free insured shipping is included every step — the shipping kit to your door, your dress to our facility, and the finished dress or chest back to you.
For comparison, most local bridal shops and dry cleaners charge $400–$800 for preservation that uses ordinary materials and carries no long-term guarantee. See how our transparent pricing compares. Dresses over 20 years old or with set-in yellowing need our Wedding Dress Restoration service ($460–$535) instead of standard cleaning.
Select Your Service
We offer three cleaning and preservation services. The choice usually comes down to your dress’s value and how delicate the fabric is.
Perfect For: Wedding dresses under 20 years old, originally priced under $2,000.
Perfect For: Couture wedding dresses under 20 years old, originally priced over $2,000.
Perfect For: Dresses you’ll wear or sell within a year — sample, vow renewal, or resale.
Not sure which one is right for your dress?
Take our 60-second service selector and we’ll match you to the right service.
Since 1913
We’re the Elite Authorized Retailer for Wedding Gown Preservation Co. — their first and longest-standing dedicated online retailer — the state-of-the-art preservation facility in Endicott, New York that has cared for wedding dresses for more than a century. Every dress we clean is processed at that same facility — never subcontracted and always handled by a fully trained preservation technician.
Our brides leave us 5-star reviews on The Knot and WeddingWire for years — 17-time WeddingWire Couples’ Choice winner, 12-time The Knot Best of Weddings winner, and an inductee in The Knot Best of Weddings Hall of Fame. Read what brides actually say about us →
Questions
A few of the questions we hear most often about our cleaning service. For the complete list, see our full FAQ.
Wedding dress cleaning starts at $260 for our Clean-Only service — a single price regardless of fabric or dress size (a $100 surcharge may apply only for unusually large, heavy, or heavily soiled dresses). Your dress will receive museum-quality cleaning and will be returned on a premium hanger in a garment bag, ready to wear or sell (steam pressing before wearing is recommended as some wrinkling may occur during shipping), includes free insured round-trip shipping. If you’d prefer long-term preservation, Traditional and Celebrity Preservation services also include museum-quality cleaning starting at $360.
A local dry cleaner can usually remove surface stains, but typically lacks the specialized technology and expertise to safely eliminate invisible stains — the ones that can cause yellowing years later. Wedding dress cleaning without preservation doesn’t protect your dress against the long-term yellowing, fabric deterioration, or invisible stains that surface over time. If you want to protect your dress for generations to come, you’ll want to have it professionally preserved, which includes cleaning. Read more about our cleaning process.
Yes — our Clean-Only service offers wedding dress cleaning using the same museum-quality process, then returns it on a premium hanger in a garment bag. It’s the right fit if you plan to wear or sell your dress within the year.
Wedding dress cleaning without preservation takes about 2–3 weeks at our facility, plus shipping — typically 3–4 weeks total from order to delivery. If you’d prefer long-term preservation instead, which includes the same museum-quality cleaning plus the preservation chest, that service takes 4–14 weeks from order to delivery (peak season runs toward the longer end). Either way, your free shipping kit arrives within 4–5 business days of ordering.
The Wedding Dress Preservation Company specializes exclusively in wedding dress cleaning and preservation, serving brides nationwide with a simple, convenient process — we conveniently send a free insured shipping kit to your door, you simply drop it off at any FedEx location, and we handle the rest. We’re an Elite Authorized Retailer for Wedding Gown Preservation Co., a state-of-the-art facility that has cared for more than 3 million dresses since 1913, backed by hundreds of verified 5-star reviews, multiple Couples’ Choice and Best of Weddings awards, and a written 100-year guarantee behind every order.
No — our museum-quality cleaning process handles everything. In fact, please don’t have your dress dry cleaned beforehand — a prior treatment can set stains we’d otherwise be able to remove.
Our technicians are skilled at safely removing typical wedding day stains such as champagne, wine, cake, food, makeup, lipstick, perspiration, blood, grass, mud, grease, tar and most other beverages. For tough stains, our skilled technicians will take three passes at safely removing them. If we’re unable to safely remove a stain, you’ll receive a note back with your dress letting you know.
Yes — your dress’s insurance coverage begins from the moment you drop off your dress with FedEx, continues during the time at the cleaning facility, and lasts until it safely arrives back to you. Insurance covers the unlikely event of loss, theft, or damage at any stage of the process. A receipt for the original purchase price is required for any insurance claim.
Free insured shipping, every step. 100-year anti-yellowing guarantee. Award-winning museum-quality cleaning trusted by over 3 million brides.
