A Chicago-area bride-to-be’s desperate search for her mom’s long misplaced wedding dress led to a miracle for a grieving family halfway across the country.
Lexie Ippolito, 28, dreamed of wearing her mother’s Michelangelo-style strapless dress when she walks down the aisle next year — but her hopes were crushed when she learned the gown sent back by a dress-preservation company years ago was the wrong one, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“It was just heart-wrenching,” Ippolito, who lives in Schaumburg, Illinois, told the outlet. “I feel like both our hearts sank to the bottom of our stomachs.”
Her disappointment turned to determination, and the future bride went online to track down the dress and determine whose gown had mistakenly been sent to the family in 2010.
Ippolito’s campaign on Facebook and TikTok garnered thousands of likes but no dress, but she inadvertently stumbled on a different mystery that had haunted a California family for years.
The newly anointed online sleuth traced the dress her family was mistakenly given and learned it was worn by bride Heidi Webber McClellan at her 2007 wedding, two years before she died from a failed bone marrow transplant, the Tribune reported.
Her mom, Sue Webber-Brown, imagined she’d never see it again, “never in a million years.
“Not only did I lose my daughter, but I lost my daughter’s wedding dress,” she 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.”
She said she was grateful for Ippolito’s effort to track down her family.
“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,” she added. “Not many people would do that.”
The wedding dress snafu came after Ippolito’s mom sent the dress to Shaumburg David’s Bridal in March 2010, which shipped it to Memories Gown Preservation in Houston, Texas, a dry cleaning business that was later sold — but not before sending back the wrong dress.
Colby Shapiro, whose family bought Memories Grown Preservation last year, said records for the 2010 snafu aren’t available to determine what went wrong, the outlet said.
“I don’t know if it was a freak thing that happened in 2010, if the tags got misplaced,” he said. “Its definitely not prevalent in the business.”
Thanks to Ippolito’s sleuthing, Heidi Webber McClellan’s wedding dress is on it’s way to California — but her frantic search for her mom’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.”
