Future bride Abigail Kingston is taking the “something borrowed” refrain to heart — she’ll be the 11th woman in her family to get married in the same dress.
The gown, a two-piece, satin and lace skirt and bodice with puffy sleeves, was handmade in New York City in 1895 — for Kingston’s great-great-grandmother, Mary Lowry of Buffalo.
Kingston remembers taking piano lessons as an 8-year-old while staring at black and white photos of the first six brides in the dress — including her own mother, Leslie Kingston — that sat on the piano.
“I just kept looking up at the pictures and saying, ‘I hope one day I can be married and I’ll wear the dress,’ ” the executive assistant from Charlotte, NC, told The Post. “I’ve always wanted that fairy tale.”
But when Kingston, 30, got engaged to boyfriend Jason Curtis, 32, in Grand Central Terminal last year, it seemed unlikely to come true. The last bride, Kingston’s cousin, wore it in 1991. But when the dress arrived at Kingston’s mother’s house in Bethlehem, Pa., after being stored for more than two decades in a cardboard box, it was brown, tattered and too small for the 5-foot-10 bride-to-be.
“I thought there was no way I would ever be able to wear the dress,” Kingston said.
In addition to a century’s wear and tear, each bride had altered the gown’s size and style, adding lots of lace and gradually shortening the cathedral-length train to calf length.
Kingston and her mother were determined to restore it to its Victorian glory.
“It’s not really about the way it looks, it’s more about the generations and the family tradition that has been passed down from bride to bride and that’s what makes it so much more meaningful,” said Kingston.
And so dress designer Deborah LoPresti began the painstaking 200 hours of work to recreate the original design. LoPresti spent hours sorting through fabric samples in New York City and three days hand-stitching 80 pleats into the dress’s replacement sleeves.
Kingston will don the 120-year-old masterpiece when she marries her Prince Charming at The Lake House Inn in Pennsylvania on Oct. 17.
“It was in rags . . . and when I had my final fitting, it really felt like I was Cinderella,” she said.