It was wartime when Judy Barry married Walter Wolicki in Chicago, wearing a wedding dress made from parachute silk.
Her family was Czech; his was Polish. Money was tight in 1944 and Walter, at the start of a long career in the US Army, used his military connections to source silk for the bride's gown.
Seventy-two years later their granddaughter Yasmine Loupis is preparing to wear the dress to her own wedding. It was preserved and handed down by her mother Maruschka, who wore it when she married Yasmine's father George in 1978.
"I got goosebumps seeing her in it," Maruschka said. "The fact that she fit into it at all, it's almost like it was meant to be."
She marvelled at "the sheer magic of the fact that a) the dress survived and b) it fits three generations of women".
The Wolickis were a private couple and didn't talk in detail about the history of their relationship. Maruschka never saw a photograph of their wedding day and only learned just before her own wedding that her mother kept her dress.
The dress is one of the only heirlooms still in the family's keeping, along with a christening gown made from the leftover parachute silk.
"We were military and moved constantly," Maruschka said. "Whatever you own had to fit in a very small collection of suitcases your whole life. So the fact that my mother kept that dress is a miracle."
Judy brought the gown over from the US when she flew to Sydney for her daughter's wedding. Maruschka had it taken in and cut off the train, attaching it instead to the fleur d'orange headpiece also handed down by her mother.
Seeing the dress "made my mother's existence as a woman real for me", Maruschka said. "Up until that point she was my mother. But you look at that dress and realise there must have been a romantic moment there somewhere. It ties the generations together."
When Yasmine, 33, marries her partner Jacob McKee-Wright in Tasmania next month, she will have transformed something old into something new once more, removing the train from the headpiece and shortening the sleeves of the dress.
"I always knew it was an option for me to wear it, and never assumed I'd wear anything else," Yasmine said. "It hasn't gone out of style, it's just that we've adapted it to our personal preference."
Judy died last year, but knew Yasmine would be wearing her wedding dress.
"I think she'd be very proud to see me wearing it," Yasmine said. "It's a real shame that something so beautiful and so meaningful ... [usually] just gets worn once and that's it.
"It's really nice that we've had the opportunity to pass it down," she said. "Hopefully mine will get passed down as well and we'll keep the tradition growing. It's beautiful that there can be that continuity."
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