A bride wore her mother's wedding dress from the '90s, and it still looks brand-new 30 years later

When Lechner was a young child, her dad traveled frequently for work, and while he was out of town, Lechner would request to watch her parents' wedding video.

The original dress featured a full skirt, and puffy, long sleeves.

Lechner's mom assumed she was emotional because she missed her father.

"One day she finally asked me, 'Why do you cry every time you watch this video?'" Lechner said.

After seeing how emotional her daughter was, Lechner's mom offered to let her daughter wear the gown when she grew up.

"I just remember my whole childhood, if anything wedding would come up, she would remind me that I could wear the dress," Lechner said.

But the offer felt far off, as Lechner was so young when the offers started.

"I'm friends with his sister, and he came and picked her up from school when we were in high school," Lechner said.

"I just thought he was really cute, but he was my best friend's brother, so he was off-limits," she added.

Lechner and Saxton ended up connecting when they went to the same college. They've been together ever since.

They planned their wedding for just six months later. After they got engaged, Lechner's mom reminded her she could wear her dress.

"She would always say, 'If you want to just chop it up and use pieces of it, I don't care,'" Lechner said of her mom's attitude toward the dress. "It's in a box, so you can always use it."

Lechner decided to try the dress on, and she fell in love with it.

She decided to wear the dress on her wedding day.

"I didn't even go try on dresses," Lechner said. "That was the first one I tried on, and I thought it was so beautiful."

The biggest change Lechner made to the dress was removing the retro long sleeves.

She instead opted for thin, off-the-shoulder straps that created a romantic vibe.

The lower neckline helped to update the dress.

Lechner paired the gown with a long veil.

She liked the length of the gown, but the original dress felt a bit too large. The final silhouette was much slimmer.

Lechner also had a layer of white fabric removed from the train, so the lace design was front and center.

Lechner's seamstress had experience working with heirloom gowns, so Lechner was confident in her abilities.

But she said it still made her nervous when the sleeves were ripped off the original dress.

"It was better than what I imagined that it could have transformed into," she said.

The alterations cost about $800 in total. "I don't think I could have found a dress for under $1,000 that looked like that," Lechner said.

"As soon as I put it on, she started crying," Lechner said. Lechner's father was emotional upon seeing the dress as well.

"It was giving him flashbacks of when my mom walked down the aisle to him, and he kept talking about it," she said. "He was crying, and it made me cry."

"He knew that I was wearing my mom's dress and I was getting it altered, but he had no idea what it looked like originally or anything like that," Lechner said.

"He just kept saying, 'Oh, you look so beautiful,'" she said of his reaction to her wedding day look.

"I was really worried about not liking it in the end," Lechner said of the alterations process. "But it just made the day even more special to wear my mom's dress."

"We go on adventures together. He's there for me. We talk about everything," she said. "He really is the person I go to for everything. I just feel lucky that I really feel like I've married my best friend."

Lechner plans on keeping her wedding dress in case any of her future relatives want to wear the gown someday.

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