In a corner of the Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey—between shelves of current nonfiction and foreign-language DVDs, and near a six-foot-tall globe donated by local Rotarians—the gray carpeting is flecked with sequins. The flotsam of a drag-queen reading hour? The recent Barbra Streisand memoir, hemorrhaging fabulousness? Nope. These sequins herald the entrance to the office of the library’s director, Adele Puccio, who collects previously worn wedding dresses and then loans or gives them to any bride who needs one. Puccio currently has more than fifty such dresses, most hanging on racks in her office. “It’s a lot,” Puccio, a practical woman who had on a floral blouse and clear-framed eyeglasses, said. “It’s a little hard to maneuver in here.”
Matching needy brides with used wedding gowns isn’t new. During the Second World War, both Eleanor Roosevelt and the romance novelist Barbara Cartland helped provide British military brides with wedding attire; in 2020, Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, loaned out her wedding dress to several women whose dreams for their big day had been derailed by the pandemic. But Puccio is in it for the fun. She allows women to try on dresses even if they aren’t getting married.
Puccio got married in 1985, when she was nineteen, in a simple chiffon dress with sheer, puffy sleeves. She grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, two blocks from the legendary bridal store Kleinfeld. “You needed an appointment, but I would go in and sell Girl Scout cookies, and hang out and watch,” she said. “If they were, say, throwing out some old headpiece, I’d take it.” She began collecting dresses for a bridal show that she staged, in 2000, at the public library in Bayonne, where she worked at the time. When the show was over, she kept at it: “I got one from freecycle.org in 2013—a strapless dress with a pick-up skirt that looked just like the dress on the poster for ‘Bridesmaids.’ The woman wrote, ‘That’s it, I threw his cheating ass out—I’m getting rid of the dress.’”
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Puccio helped four young women look for dresses at the library. They used Puccio’s office as a changing room, and, amid oohing and aahing, she persuaded them to parade down the hallway. “Come on out,” she said. “We’ll let our own Jewish mother have her way with you.” She meant Gale Zetlen, who works in circulation. Zetlen, along with a scrum of other employees and patrons, adjudicated from the sidelines: a bridal Yalta.
One of the brides-to-be—a project manager who’d driven from Queens—began to cry when she looked at herself in the mirror wearing a strapless chiffon gown with a scalloped neckline: it was the one. “I feel great,” she said. “I feel pretty.”
The four brides offered one another encouragement and counsel. “How does it feel?” one asked, as another swept out of Puccio’s office in an embroidered Oleg Cassini pouf.
Cartoon by Roland High Link copied
“Can’t breathe,” the dress-wearer gasped.
One of Puccio’s greatest challenges is finding dresses that will fit her clientele. “Most of what I have is size 0, 2, or 6,” she said. “Women used to live on Tab, cigarettes, and diet pills.” Her collection is heavy on dresses from the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and seventies, and has included pieces by Scaasi, Badgley Mischka, Martina Liana, and Christos.
While the brides were trying on gowns, a Metuchen resident walked in with a donation: the tiered, tea-length dress that his recently deceased mother had sewn for her own wedding, in 1954. Puccio said that she’d also recently acquired a Priscilla of Boston dress that looked just like the one Rhoda Morgenstern got married in on “Rhoda.”
Eventually, the four brides headed home. Three had found dresses, and their faces wore serene but expectant expressions. Puccio sat down at her desk. This year, she has given away more than sixty dresses, to women who have come from as far away as Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Florida. One selected a dress and shipped it to her granddaughter in Poland.
Sara Blakely, the Spanx founder, approves of Puccio’s program. “Trying on dresses ignites something in us,” she said. “Probably from reading fairy tales in childhood.”
Puccio has set a couple of new goals for herself. One: she hopes to find the time, amid her library duties, to organize her collection by size and vintage. Two: she’d love it if brides contacted her by e-mail to schedule appointments—like at Kleinfeld. “I can’t make everyone happy,” she said. “But if someone says, ‘I want to look like my grandmother at her wedding’? I’ve got it.”♦
