(CNN) – Samantha Mathew’s “personal item” in hand luggage on international flights is often very personal – her wedding dress.
“We generally just stuff it in a vacuum-sealed pouch … and it looks basically brand new,” said Mathew, referring to Sam.
Or almost. According to their calculations, the dress was in 13 countries since their wedding in May 2018.
“Right now it’s kind of dirty. We’ve taken it in a few places. So not brand new, but it comes out presentable.”
The dress is part of a tradition she and husband Andrew Mathew, both 29, adopted to celebrate their marriage and love of travel. You have posed for honeymoon and anniversary photos in front of some of the world’s most famous landmarks, the gauzy dress swirling around Sam.
It’s a tradition that grew out of her desire to wear the dress as often as possible.
Spending a lot of money on a dress that she would wear only once found Sam, a behavior analyst who works with children with developmental disabilities, extremely impractical. At first she had hoped to buy a used or very cheap dress, but her mother had other ideas.
“She wanted me to have the dress of my dreams, and I kept telling her I didn’t have a ‘dress of my dreams,’ but she was pretty insistent not to buy a used dress,” Sam said. “She wanted it to be mine, so maybe she could wear it or dress up in it if one day I had a daughter or whatever.”
Samantha and Andrew Mathew pose in front of Abu Simbel in Egypt during their 2021 anniversary trip.
Courtesy Samantha Mathew
Wanted: wedding dress. Must travel well
They went clothes shopping where Sam tried on “big fluffy dresses” and her eyes sparkled at prices as high as $ 6,000. Her mother fell in love with a flowing 1920s Old Hollywood style silk dress that cost about $ 5,000.
Sam couldn’t, and she decided that if an expensive dress came up, she would definitely wear it more than once (hers is around $ 1,300, she recalls).
She and Andrew, a family doctor, decided to have small wedding parties at each of their many honeymoon destinations, with photos to capture those moments, and finally decided to travel with the dress on for the annual anniversary trips.
The search for a dress continued, with specific requirements.
Sam went into a store and said to the saleswoman, “Well, I’m actually looking for something that moves well. So if I have to … roll it up into a ball and stuff it in a bag, it will come out Looks good.” ‘ And I remember she just gave me that look like I was crazy, “she said.
At the Acropolis in Athens, the wedding dress photos were destroyed by staff on site, but the couple were referred to this more distant point of view.
Courtesy Samantha Mathew
But she found a dress – an ivory-colored chiffon gown with a lace bodice from Essense of Australia – that matched her body type and met essential travel needs.
She and her husband wanted to keep the wedding simple. After many years of study at the University of Miami, where the two met, he was about to begin his medical residency in Los Angeles.
“I am not one of those people who have dreamed of my wedding since I was a child, so the smaller, the better for me. And Andrew didn’t want anything big either. He just wanted to travel, ”she says.
They ended up having two small wedding events – an official church wedding outside of Dallas, where her husband has family, and a get-together with friends and family in South Florida, where Sam is from. And they put a lot of time and resources into a stormy three-week honeymoon, with dress in tow.
Moments from a marriage
They traveled a lot on their honeymoon: London, Marrakech, Rome, Kenya’s Masai Mara, Bali, Bangkok and Beijing.
The first time Sam put the dress on in public happened during a 12-hour stay in London, where the couple posed in several popular locations.
“When we were in front of Buckingham Palace, there actually was a group of other tourists who fixed my hair and positioned the dress and had us do different poses, which I thought was funny.”
On their honeymoon, photos were styled by other tourists in front of London’s Buckingham Palace.
Courtesy Samantha Mathew
With two more anniversary trips, Sam has gotten pretty good at putting the dress on in the blink of an eye. She wears pants or shorts and a white tank top or sports bra for a quick bridal transformation.
“Then we took a few photos, said nice things to each other – we did our own little ceremony, so to speak,” she said. Her social media accounts are private, and “the tradition is really only for us, our families and close friends, and hopefully one day for the families we raise together.”
Andrew initially brought a suit jacket for their little ceremonies, but he’s now more inclined to put Sam and the dress in the spotlight.
“He’d rather be the photographer than in the pictures at this point,” said Sam. “I always get him to take one because that’s some kind of memory I want to have.”
Sometimes people stare, sometimes bystanders style the couple and take the photos. Overall, the reception during the trip was positive.
“Everyone was really very helpful,” said Sam. Only twice has the traditional costume tradition been discarded by employees at sights they have visited. Machu Picchu in Peru and the Acropolis in Athens, although in Athens they were directed to a more distant location overlooking the Parthenon.
The couple’s second wedding anniversary in May 2020 was celebrated at their home in Los Angeles.
Courtesy Samantha Mathew
A flexible tradition
In 2019 the couple celebrated their anniversary in Costa Rica. Last year when the pandemic raged, the couple snapped anniversary photos of themselves at home in the Los Angeles metropolitan area where they now live, complete with toilet paper and other sought-after supplies.
That year, fully vaccinated with a two-month hiatus (a job change for Sam coincided with the end of Andrew’s stint), the couple embarked on a two-stage anniversary trip. Two weeks in Peru, a few days at home and then almost six weeks of ping-pong around the world to Italy, Jordan, Egypt, Kenya, Greece and Croatia.
While they may not be the ones to repeat travel destinations, they have revisited Italy and Kenya because they loved these countries so much and they were open to visitors. “It was different, but it was still possible,” Sam said of his international travel in 2021.
She and Andrew haven’t booked any international trips for yourself or the dress, “but the plan is to go ahead and just get it out there and breathe as much as you can, until maybe it’s just a scrap.
“And then maybe we can sew it into our daughter’s dress or put it in a frame. I don’t know, do something with it, “said Sam.
There have to be more memories of this well-traveled, worn dress.
