What does “trash the dress” mean in Italian wedding culture?

This tongue-in-cheek clip about burning your wedding dress “in style” points to a real bridal trend: trash the dress, called in Italian bruciare (o rovinare) l’abito da sposa. Days or weeks after the wedding, some couples stage a second photoshoot where the gown gets deliberately wrecked — soaked in the sea, dragged through mud, or, for the boldest, set on fire.

The idea traces back to a 1998 scene in the American soap opera Sunset Beach, where a character dives into the ocean still in her wedding dress. Photographers picked it up as a genre: since the dress has already done its one job, ruining it makes for bolder, more relaxed, more memorable pictures than a stiff studio portrait.