Woman Creates World’s Largest Beaded Wedding Gown Weighing Almost 400 Pounds [Video]


A Minnesota woman, Gail Be, spent more than three years crafting a beaded wedding gown that is too heavy for anyone to wear.

Be, who describes herself as a “visionary artist and designer and bead sculptor,” worked with 23 other women to create the gown in a warehouse just outside of Minneapolis.

“It is a work of art,” she told ABC News.

The wedding gown took 20,000 hours to complete and consists of almost a million beads. The gown is a size 4, Be says, and is made of 500,000 glass pearls and over 400,000 crystal beads – some of those vintage Swarovski from her personal collection. It has a 20 foot, 6 inch train and took seven miles of beading wire to construct.

She financed the gown herself and does not have an estimate of the cost, but with so many beads and so much labor, it is sure to be far more expensive than most people could afford — not to mention being too heavy to wear. Be says the gown weighs nearly 400 pounds.

One of her designs, a headpiece, was worn by Lady Gaga for her iTunes cover of “Anything Goes” with Tony Bennett, but Be has her eye on the movies for the wedding gown. She has hired an agency to help her find interested studios and costume designers in L.A.

“I want to work with people that have a limitless mind of what they want to do,” she says. “I want to be pressed to the depth of my creativity and I don’t think I can do that anywhere but movies.”

According to the World Record Academy, the gown, dubbed “Fantasy” by its creator, beats the world record for the largest beaded wedding dress. However, because officials did not watch the gown-making process from the beginning, it is not eligible for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records – even though Be is having the bead count verified by a former colleague.

Be started thinking about the wedding gown almost 13 years ago when she created some lacework she thought she would “never make a dress big enough for.”

She put the lacework away until 2011, when she took it back out and she says someone told her, “That is the most beautiful piece I’ve ever seen.”

She began designing the gown around that piece of lace.

“I kept going and going,” she said. “It’s in my warehouse and when it finally got to the back I stopped and said, ‘It’s done,’ and everyone got up and clapped.”

“I was going for 250,000 beads. I thought that would be awesome,” Be said. “It blew my mind every time it was growing.”

The 57-year-old artist has been beading for over 25 years.

“I don’t read patterns. I don’t draw,” Be said. “I don’t know how to sew. I don’t do mathematical equations. I do this from the ground up and when the dressmakers ask where it’s going and I say, ‘How do I know? We’re only halfway through it.'”

Many brides use their nuptials as an excuse to go “all out,” but this gorgeous gown is just a bit over the top — even for celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who the Inquisitr reported spend $500,000 on her wedding dress.

[Image via ABC News]

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