A Schaumburg, Illinois, woman searching for her mother’s missing wedding dress hasn’t found the gown she was looking for, but her effort uncovered a 15-year mystery for a family in California.
Lexie Ippolito, 28, had hoped to wear her mother’s strapless, Michelangelo-style wedding dress at her own wedding next year. Instead, she discovered the gown returned by a dress-preservation company years earlier wasn’t her mother’s at all.
“It was just heart-wrenching,” Ippolito told the Chicago Tribune. “I feel like both our hearts sank to the bottom of our stomachs.”
Rather than give up, Ippolito took to Facebook and TikTok to find out whose dress her family had actually received and to track down her mother’s real gown. The posts drew thousands of likes but no sign of the missing dress. They did, however, lead her to the family whose gown had ended up in her mother’s hands by mistake.
Ippolito traced the dress to Heidi Webber McClellan, who wore it at her 2007 wedding. McClellan died two years later following a failed bone marrow transplant.
McClellan’s mother, Sue Webber-Brown, had long assumed the dress was gone for good.
“Not only did I lose my daughter, but I lost my daughter’s wedding dress,” Webber-Brown said. “And I wanted it. I wanted it for my granddaughter that I hope to have someday and have now. I never thought I’d ever see it again.”
Webber-Brown said she was struck by Ippolito’s willingness to keep searching after learning the dress wasn’t hers.
“Lexie could have just said, ‘Not my dress,’ and set it aside,” Webber-Brown said. “The fact that she would go to so much effort to try to find us, the owner of it, I can’t even explain. It’s overwhelming. Not many people would do that.”
The mix-up dates back to March 2010, when Ippolito’s mother sent her dress to a David’s Bridal in Schaumburg, which shipped it to Memories Gown Preservation, a dry-cleaning business in Houston, Texas. The business was later sold, and it’s unclear what went wrong before the wrong dress was sent back.
Colby Shapiro, whose family bought Memories Gown Preservation last year, said records from the 2010 incident no longer exist, making it impossible to pin down the cause.
“I don’t know if it was a freak thing that happened in 2010, if the tags got misplaced,” Shapiro said. “It’s definitely not prevalent in the business.”
McClellan’s dress is now on its way back to her family in California. Ippolito’s own search for her mother’s gown continues.
“I don’t know if my mom’s dress is going to be found from this,” Ippolito said. “But I’m just happy that Heidi’s dress was in my hands and that I put the effort into finding the family.”
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