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For most brides, their wedding day is of unparalleled importance and their wedding dress hallowed. However, the case of one unfortunate bride in Italy was recently recounted in court. She suffered a disaster when the stitching on her expensive dress came apart as she stood at the altar and the dress slipped open, revealing her bottom to 100 shocked guests. The couple were not able to take any proper photographs of the ceremony, their lawyer said, because of the bride’s semi-naked state. She is now suing the dress shop in Rapallo for €23,000 compensation for financial loss and moral injury.

Wedding dresses have featured in various cases in different jurisdictions. In 2002, Jennifer Lucier Mora sued the Hyatt Tamaya Resort at Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico alleging that it was negligent in failing to take proper steps to avoid disaster. A gust of wind had swept up her dress during the outdoor ceremony; it was then run over by a golf cart that was a part of the proceedings. Her claim was eventually settled out of court.

In 2001, a woman in Scotland spent months searching for the perfect wedding gown, eventually choosing one for £2,000. The dress stayed in tact for the ceremony but started to split immediately after the vows had been exchanged, so that her husband had to use various desperate manual techniques to prevent the dress disintegrating during the photo sessions. The shop owner defended the woman’s claim for compensation by arguing that she must have treated the dress inappropriately. “You treat a wedding dress as a costume,” the shop owner said, “not like jeans and a sweater.” The sheriff awarded £500 damages, ruling that a wedding dress must “last the course of one day’s wedding activities”.

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Wearing a wedding dress, though, is no protection against the law. In September 2006, in Sedgwick County, Kansas, a woman arrived at a courthouse to get married. But when the court clerk entered her name into a computer for her marriage licence, two warrants for her arrest came up on the screen. The day ended not with her wearing a gold band on her finger but two bands of silver on her wrists — she was handcuffed and hitched over to the county jail in her wedding dress on a $200,000 bond for probation violations.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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