When Samantha Pereira, of Maryland, got engaged this past summer to her now fiancé, Dan Dasilva, one of the first things on her wedding preparation to-do list was to try on her mother's wedding dress.
Growing up, Samantha had seen her parents' wedding photos all over her childhood home in New Jersey and she relished the chance to step into the very same dress. It was always a guess on whether she or her sister, Nicole, would wind up wearing it first.
"The first thing, my mom especially, wanted to do was finally get her dress out so we can finally try it on. She's been waiting for this for years," Samantha tells Inside Edition Digital.
Her mother, Christina, pulled the box out of the attic. It fit — but Samantha noticed her mother didn't seem too happy.
"I was expecting my mom to start crying while she's looking at me in her dress, and she didn't," she says.
It turns out that it was the wrong dress.
"You can just assume what happened next. She just freaked out, started crying, broke my heart to see her like that," Samantha says.
"I cried. My husband's like, 'Why are you crying?' And it was shocking because I saved it for 30 years," Christina tells Inside Edition Digital while looking at their wedding album from their dining room table.
She notes the difference between the two dresses. "It was just a nice, simple, elegant dress. It wasn't beaded. It was more satiny, and I would've loved for Samantha to have it. My dress had a long veil. My dress wasn't so beaded like this," Christina explains.
Samantha Pereira and Christina and Luis Pereira
Christina married Luis in June 1994. In October of that year, she brought her gown to East Side Cleaners in Newark, New Jersey, where she paid $165 for it to be preserved. According to the labels on the box, it appears it was then sent out to Allied Heirlooms, a company in Picayune, Mississippi. That business was then acquired by Wedding Gown Preservation Company in Endicott, New York. Christina called customer service, but the rep on the phone said they didn't have a database of customers. Christina likely picked up the gown from the cleaners in February of 1995.
To help find the lost dress, Samantha made a TikTok in hopes of spreading the word. In a few weeks, it's raked up nearly 900,000 views.
"One woman actually opened up her box and told my daughter that there was no dress in it, just her veil and underneath it was filled with tissue paper, no dress," Christina says, noting it wasn't sent out from the same cleaners. Another woman thought the dress in the video was hers, but it turns out, she had the exact style tucked away in her preservation box. Faith Nelson, married in 1999 in the Midwest, commented on Samantha's Facebook post, "I had the same thing happen to me this year when I opened my wedding dress and still have been unsuccessful trying to find it … It saddens me to hear your same story. I pray you find it!"
At this point, Christina wants to at least return the gown in her possession to its rightful owner.
"It's sad because this is something you want to save to hand down to your children or grandchildren. You see movies about this," she says.
Samantha will wait a little longer before dress-shopping in hopes her mother's actual gown will be returned.
"I know it's a slim chance, but it's still a chance," she adds.
Related Stories
Local News
