Wedding Dress Mix-Up: Woman Opens Preservation Box After 28 Years To Pass Down Handmade Garter Only To Discover Gown Isn't Hers

By: KDKA-TV News Staff

MOUNT LEBANON (KDKA) -- Do you recognize this wedding dress?

A Mount Lebanon woman is desperately searching for her gown after only recently discovering a mix-up by her dry cleaner 28 years ago.

Karen Huska Manning got married in October of 1993. Later that month, she says she sent her dress, veil and garter – which was made out of her own mother's wedding dress – to be cleaned and preserved.

After 28 years, she recently opened that preservation box to get the garter to give to her son's fiancée. However, when she opened it, she discovered her garter was missing and so was the veil.

Then, when she took a closer look at the gown, she realized it was not hers.

It was a heartbreaking moment.

"My first thought was, 'My goodness, they didn't pack my garter or my veil with my dress,' and I'm looking and it's not there and I turn to my dress, and it's not my dress either. It was heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking," Manning said.

She posted her story on Facebook, in hopes of finding her own dress and returning the dress she has to its rightful owner, and the post has gone viral. It now has more than 11,000 shares.

"I think the part of the story that folks are so enamored and empathetic with is that the garter that I'm specifically looking for was made from my mother's wedding gown. She was married in 1948," Manning said.

Manning is just hoping all that sharing leads her to the right person.

"Please look in your box. Help me find my dress, veil and the garter my mother sewed for me out of her wedding gown. I have until April when my son gets married to find it. Please!" she wrote on Facebook.

Manning says she took her dress to Suburban Dry Cleaners in Mount Lebanon shortly after her wedding.

The problem is they then sent it to Joseph Krow Company, in Westmoreland County, which burned down in 2012. All their records destroyed in the blaze.

Manning says her dress could be anywhere by now.

She writes, Krow's facility "serviced 4,200 retail dry cleaners across the country."

Manning is asking anyone who had a wedding dress dry-cleaned in the fall of 1993 to check their preservation boxes.

"It could be a one-for-one swap. You could have my dress, I could have yours, or perhaps there's more of a twist going on here and you don't have mine, but I have yours, so I guess the point there is, if you got married in 1993 and had your dress cleaned, please open it up because perhaps you have mine," she said,

She is hoping to pass that garter down throughout her family's generations, so it means a great deal to her.