When she was in fifth grade, Lexie Ippolito watched her mother get married in a stunning Michelangelo-style strapless wedding dress. Ippolito, now 28, always imagined that she, too, would one day wear that same beaded gown and matching sheer veil. Once she got engaged, she wanted her mother’s to be the first wedding dress she tried on.
But that childhood dream is more elusive than the 2027 bride once thought. This summer, when she and her mom unboxed the preserved gown the family had stored for more than a decade, they instead found a stranger’s dress.
“It was just heart-wrenching,” Ippolito said, recalling the moment when she opened the preserved gown at her mom’s Schaumburg home. “I feel like both our hearts sank to the bottom of our stomachs.”
Ippolito set out on a mission to find her mom’s missing dress. Embracing the power and connectivity of social media, she hoped her message would reach whoever had her mom’s dress and be able to swap the dresses in time for her rehearsal dinner next year. Her posts across TikTok earned thousands of comments and likes, and a recent post to a Facebook page for Chicago-area brides earned almost 2,000 likes and was shared by dozens of brides-to-be offering to help.
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Turns out, a partial answer was stitched in the dress. On Friday, Ippolito took a closer look at the stranger’s dress and found a small tag with the names of the bride and groom and their wedding date.
Ippolito again turned to the internet for answers.
That stranger turned out to be Heidi Webber McClellan of Oroville, California, who got married in 2007. Webber’s mother, Sue Webber-Brown, used a David’s Bridal wedding dress preservation package to clean her daughter’s gown after Webber McClellan died from a rejected bone marrow transplant in October 2009.
Webber-Brown “never in a million years” imagined she would hold her late daughter’s dress again, as she believed it was lost in the mail on the way back from preservation in Texas. Then she got a seemingly out-of-the-blue Facebook message from Ippolito, explaining the decade-old mix-up.
“Not only did I lose my daughter, but I lost my daughter’s dress,” Webber-Brown said. “And I wanted it — I wanted it for my granddaughter that I hoped to have someday and have now. I never thought I’d ever see it again.”
Ippolito’s mother was mistakenly given Webber McClellan’s dress when she picked it up from a Schaumburg David’s Bridal in March 2010. The bridal shop sent the dress out of state to be preserved by Memories Gown Preservation, a Houston dry cleaning business that has since closed. The company was later sold to Wedding Gown Preservation Co. in Endicott, New York, which, according to owner Colby Schapiro, does not have records from 2010.
The odds of a mistaken dress swap happening during the preservation process are rare, especially today with tracking technology available throughout the cleaning process, according to Schapiro. His family’s business acquired Memories Gown Preservation in December 2025 and works with David’s Bridal to offer its dress preservation services.
Typically, when wedding dresses are cleaned, all individual pieces of the outfit, including its gloves, veil and more, are marked with identical identification barcodes, according to Schapiro. The tags stay with the garments through the cleaning and pressing process, which can take several weeks. This eliminates the risk of missing or mixed-up pieces.
“I don’t know if it was a freak thing that happened in 2010 if the tags got misplaced,” Schapiro said. “It’s definitely not prevalent in the business.”
Webber McClellan’s dress and her mother’s dress were 120 ticket ID numbers apart during the preservation process, according to Ippolito, who has since been working with Wedding Gown Preservation Co. to try to find the gown. She said she is more determined than ever to find all 120 Memories Gown Preservation’s customers with the ID tags in between to track down the dress.
David’s Bridal did not return the Tribune’s email request for comment.
Now more than 16 years after Webber McClellan’s death, her wedding dress is coming home to California, thanks to Ippolito, who found a small, blue, embroidered tag sewn into the dress’ lining at her mom’s Illinois home. It read “Heidi and Jake, May 19, 2007,” the couple’s wedding date.
Despite having no last name or city or state to go off of, Ippolito searched the couple’s wedding date online and found the California bride’s obituary. She then found Webber McClellan’s family on Facebook and sent them a message, explaining the situation.
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Webber McClellan’s dress is, finally, expected to arrive in California later this week.
“Lexie could have just said ‘not my dress’ and set it aside,” Webber-Brown said through tears. “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. It’s overwhelming. Not many people would do that.”
With the swapped dress that was in her mother’s possession on its way to Webber-Brown, Ippolito remains hopeful that someone out there finds her mother’s dress — a David’s Bridal Michelangelo-style T8589 — before she gets married at Holy Name Cathedral next year.
But, as shown by Webber McClellan’s lost dress, it could be anywhere in the United States, not just in the Chicago area. Ippolito urged brides who sent their gowns to be preserved through David’s Bridal in early 2010 to “go check your box.”
When she realized the dress was missing in August, she turned to social media, calling it the place for “finding lost things.” Her late October Facebook post in the bridal group was met with sympathy. Many commenters commiserated and shared their own horror stories with wedding gown preservation. Some with similar gowns even offered Ippolito the chance to borrow their dresses for her wedding next year.
“It’s restoring my faith in humanity because people who have the same dress are offering me theirs,” said Ippolito, who grew up in Jefferson Park and lives in Boston. “My heart is bursting with the kindness that I am getting from people.”
Webber-Brown said that if Ippolito could find her mom’s original dress through this decade-long mix-up, it would be a “second miracle.”
“I don’t know if my mom’s dress is going to be found from this, but I’m just happy that Heidi’s dress was in my hands and that I put the effort into finding the family,” Ippolito said. “They are so, so grateful.”