Once you've chosen your wedding dress, you'll want to keep it as perfect as possible for the big day. While you may want to look at it as often as possible, do try not to touch it too much. The sensitive, delicate fabrics that wedding dresses are created from can easily pick up oils from the cleanest of hands. When you do touch it, make sure your hands are clean, and remove any jewellery that might snag the fabric.
If possible, keep your dress hanging up in a clothes storage bag. If it's a long dress you may need to hang it from somewhere other than in a wardrobe as if the ends lie puddled on the floor for too long they will crease, and you don't want to have to worry about pressing it Balancing the coat hanger from a door frame, from a high shelf or the top of a tall wardrobe are all possible solutions. If you can't find anywhere appropriate, then the day before your wedding take it out of the storage bag and hang it in a steamy bathroom. Either use it as an excuse to jump into the tub, or just leave the shower running for a while with the door closed. This should encourage any wrinkles to drop out.
After the wedding it is best if you can ask one of your bridesmaids to pick your wedding dress up before you leave on honeymoon and take it to a specialist to be dry cleaned and any stains removed. Most wedding dress specialists offer to box up the dress appropriately. It needs to be wrapped in acid-free tissue paper which should cover the dress completely and go in between every fold. Your wedding dress should then be placed in an acid-free box for storage. The box should be as large as (sensibly) possible, to minimise the number of folds required for the dress to fit.
The box should then be stored somewhere dark and dust-free. If possible the temperature should be between 13 & 18 degrees celsius, with a relative humidity of 50%. You should avoid storing it anywhere near a heat source, bright light, or anywhere there is high humidity, dampness or condensation. In practice this rules out most lofts which is the most common place people think of for storage. Unfortunately, most lofts are unheated so if you want to preserve your dress for a daughter or daughter-in-law you may need to think of somewhere else to store it. The box should be able small enough for you to find space for it at the top or bottom of a cupboard, or on top of a wardrobe.
