Can a wedding dress ever be sustainable and stylish?

As the founder of sustainable e-tailer Rêve En Vert (which translates to ‘dream in green’), Cora Hilts’ wedding was never going to be cookie-cutter. Alongside the business, launched in 2013, she has an MA in environmental politics, which meant that sustainability was at the heart of every decision that the couple made.

“These beautiful wedding invitations - you feel guilty throwing them away. You have nowhere to put them, and most of them aren’t recyclable. So we went with paperless post,” says Cora Hilts (31) of her own wedding invitations, designed by husband-to-be Jamie, a graphic designer. The pair married in August after becoming engaged in April 2017 with a vintage ring: “the best way to avoid all the current issues with unethical gem mining.”

It is her husband, Hilts says, who sometimes has to remind her not to alienate people with her own moral code. And on her wedding day, Hilts cut herself some slack, too. “It would have been perfect if everything was 100% sustainable,” she sighs, “but we don’t live in a perfect world, and I wanted pink velvet slippers. So I did get unsustainable shoes - by Aquazzura shoes, and I don’t regret it. I looked far and wide for sustainable shoes that would look right and I just made the call at the end of the day.”

It’s a balance that she hopes to promote with her business, that “this isn’t a platform for people that are perfect. It’s a platform for people who want to look a certain way and shop sustainably and know that they’re making good choices. It would be great if you could make a lot of better choices without sacrificing style for ethics - but at the end of the day, if it’s your wedding and you want the Aquazzura shoes, and you’ve done everything else sustainably, then don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Since the wedding was held at the bride’s parents’ home in Maine, London-based friends and the Devon-born groom’s family had to fly over. To try to offset that carbon footprint a little, they asked for donations to the Rainforest alliance on their wedding registry; the other three items on the list were a Vitamix (Hilts says her biggest plastic consumption used to be houmous tubs, so now she makes her own), a bread knife, and a House of Hackney sofa cushion. Hilts also asked guests to rewear things they already owned, rather than buying new outfits for the day; her father “with a very few alterations, bravo Dad, wore the suit that he married my mother in, including the tie.”

The bride’s mother conveniently owns a garden centre in Maine, “so last year I told her the colour scheme I wanted and she grew them herself.” Plants were kept potted, so they could be resold afterwards, and tied bundles of dried flowers were the party favours for guests, set alongside organic beeswax candles on wooden tables hired from a local carpenter: “you don’t need linens when the wood is that beautiful. We designed the menu to be seasonal and we our food- “organic lobster, chicken, potatoes, tomatoes, salad “- came from the local farmers.”

If most of the concessions made to sustainability were second nature, a few felt like compromises. Hilts left it too late to commission the Swedish wedding dress designer she wanted, who uses offcuts from luxury fashion factories to create one-off pieces, but sustainability was a sticking point. Instead, her mother found a white silk dress by Reformation, an LA high-street label which uses deadstock fabric, online. When Hilts arrived home in Maine a month before the wedding, she took the dress - which was originally far too low-cut and long - to a local seamstress, who made changes using the fabric she took off the hem.

My mum said: ‘look at yourself. It’s a beautiful, simple dress that will never go out of style. Jamie will love it because it’s slinky and a little bit sexy, and you look great in it.'” After the wedding, Hilts asked her her husband if he liked the dress. “He said he had to look at pictures because he couldn’t even remember it: ‘I just remember your face, your hair, the shade of your lipstick.’”

Tell us about your sustainability friendly wedding

Was your wedding environmentally friendly? Was your dress made from deadstock fabric? Or did you opt for paperless invitations? Tell us about it in the comment section below.

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