PREVIEW

A Welsh florist is exploring innovative and alternative methods to repurpose high-end designer sample wedding gowns.

Ismanah Joce from The Silk Garden in Swansea creates beautiful, decorative, floral wedding day installations out of discarded dresses thrown out by bridal shops.

Sample dresses can be an equally expensive investment for brides, so to know bridal shops just cut up and throw out these dresses for landfill, some of which sell for thousands of pounds, is heartbreaking.

Talking about her installation, which took four months to make and is also part of her MA graduation piece with Swansea Collage of Art, Ismanah explains “My installation is made of foraged materials and waste materials. So the waste materials are both from my job as a florist and wedding dress shops because they just bin their samples, or, from the scraps of wedding dresses which are made from scratch because they don’t have anything to do with them, which I discovered when I had my wedding dress made last year. So I wanted to find a way to make something that is useful. So the flowers are all made from waste wedding dresses, and then the foliage is either foraged from the local area or literally taken out of the bin, or, taken out of all the arrangements from my job as a florist as well as bits of trees.'

“The idea behind it is to combat the waste from the wedding industry and from the cut flower industry which goes very much hand in hand with the wedding industry. I wanted to find a way to just create a new kind of circular economy. So to create this cycle where you have your wedding dress made and the waste from that goes toward making your flowers, and the waste from other weddings could go into your floristry. It just creates this cycle which cuts out the environmental impact. It mitigates the environmental impact of both the wedding and cut flower industries.'

“There are these gorgeous pieces of fabric, it seems so awful to put them in the bin. I wanted to find a way to make the waste useful.”

“I wanted to keep the piece quite simple and organic. It’s not monochromatic but you’ve just got brown, white and green which in nature in December, is pretty much what you get in Wales are brown white and green, so my style of floristry does reflect what you would find in the natural world in that moment. So I did want to carry that through into this piece. It has very calming, earthy tones.”

“All the plants in the piece would probably go in the compost heap or down the woods, wood chipper to be spread on the ground, so would return back to nature. All the fabric flowers would be repurposed as part of other floral gifts."