admin Luckily, she had an expert on hand: Polmanteer’s aunt, Mary Quigley, a producer and costume designer whose credits include The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and more. The ever-prepared Quigley, who always carries an emergency kit in her car, rushed off to grab her shears. But not everyone was so sure Bixby should cut up a multi-thousand-dollar dress.
“The bouncer at the bar actually really tried to convince me not to cut it,” she says. “I bantered back and forth with him, and I was like, ‘I’m never going to wear it again, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.’” So Quigley lopped off the bottom and they rejoined the party, dancing until the lights came on at 2 a.m.
After the wedding, Bixby took the dress to the seamstress who altered her other wedding dress to have it hemmed. “I think it’s much more wearable, because it’s not a full wedding dress now,” she says.
Brides aren’t just chopping their wedding dresses on their big days, either—some are taking shears to their hair as well in a trend that has been dubbed “the wife chop.” When Nadine Heffron got married in May, she and her husband, Thomas, whom she met in cosmetology school, knew that they wanted to do something with her hair to honor their relationship. “He was the one that suggested going that short,” Heffron says of her bob, which lands just above her shoulders. Heffron had no second thoughts about such a dramatic change, though the same can’t be said for the groom. “He was more nervous about this because he was scared he was gonna cut it too short,” she says. “But I was so excited.”
The chop didn’t just offer a transition between the ceremony and reception, but a tender moment shared between bride and groom. “That was really the only time in the day that it was just the two of us and our photographer,” she says.
Heffron kept her haircut a secret from everybody, including her parents and bridesmaids. “We told everybody that we were going to take our solo pictures after the ceremony and before the reception,” she says. “So everybody just kind of went off and did their own thing, and then we went back to our Airbnb and did the haircut.” In order to achieve the dramatic chop, Heffron installed extensions to add length. “My actual hair wasn’t that long, so I did decide to go longer with the extensions, knowing that we were going to cut it,” she says.
