Remembering Amsale Aberra, the designer who stripped the frippery and frills from wedding dresses
New York-based fashion graduate, who has died aged 64, began her business as a young bride-to-be after becoming frustrated by choice of bridal gowns
Every year, the bridal industry unveils fresh collections of wedding gowns and a breathless list of the latest trends.
However, the truth is that there has not been a significant and lasting shift in what women wear down the aisle since the late 1980s.
That was when a young bride, disappointed and frustrated by the mountains of tulle, lace and beading that defined wedding gowns at that time, decided to design her own streamlined dress.
Amsale Aberra, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, sketched out an elegant A-line gown with a high waist and sheer sleeves.
It was 1985, and that dress formed the creative seed for the bridal-wear business she founded the following year and that she ran with her husband Neil Brown until her death on Sunday, at the age of 64, from uterine cancer.
Aberra, a native of Ethiopia, helped to change the way that women presented themselves on their wedding day.
She recognised that not all women wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Disney princess, a sweet ingenue or a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
She offered women an alternative to the extravagant and ostentatious fashions of the 1980s.