Have you recently returned from your honeymoon after a first-class wedding and truly romantic ceremony? Your mind may be packed with memories to last you a lifetime as you turn your attention to building your home together. However, before you get too involved in day-to-day matters, you need to do something with your wedding dress. It is certainly something that you want to preserve and keep in good condition, quite apart from preserving its value due to the amount of money that you spent on it. How can you make sure that the gown remains safe and in all its glory so that you can pass it on to a future generation?

Don't Simply Store It

While you wore the dress for a relatively short amount of time, don't be surprised if it came into contact with all kinds of materials, both organic and not, that could have adhered to the surface in some way. Sometimes, you cannot actually see anything after a casual inspection, but if you simply store the dress in your wardrobe, any stain could set over time and be very difficult to remove in the future.

Ask the Experts

Of course, you don't want to risk this type of outcome and should consider getting the dress to a professional wedding dress cleaning service.

When you take it in, they will survey the gown very carefully to see if there are any obvious stains. It's always best to address these when they are relatively fresh, as it becomes more difficult to remove stains later on.

Dry Cleaning

It's best to dry clean the dress, as this is much kinder to the actual fabric. The solvents that are used in this process will easily remove the obvious and not-too-obvious stains while maintaining the integrity of the material. After the dry cleaning process is finished, the dress will be in perfect condition and look as good as it did when you first wore it.

Long-Term Storage

Next, ask the cleaner to pack the dress carefully for long-term storage. Usually, this will require that it be wrapped in an acid-free paper and placed into a special box that can "breathe" and cope with a variety of different temperatures. This is the best way to make sure that the dress can survive the test of time, so long as you store it in a reasonable environment.

Do It Now!

So, before you do anything else, pick up the phone and talk with your dry cleaners to set the ball rolling.