One thing that never goes out of fashion is good style. If you have a timeless sense of fashion, your clothes will survive generations to come!
This grandmother preserved her honeymoon closet perfectly and 70 years later, her granddaughter wore it with just as much aplomb!
Maddy Bill is a 27-year-old from Ambler, Pennsylvania. She made a video for her TikTok account to show people a suitcase she had received from her 91-year-old maternal grandmother, Marie D’Alessandro Donato.
The suitcase’s contents are very interesting. It contains all the outfits her grandmother wore on her honeymoon to New York in 1952. The video says that this is the first time in seventy years someone else has opened the suitcase!
Her grandmother who had gone on her honeymoon with her late husband Anthony James Donato cleaned everything she wore and packed it away like a time capsule for her children and grandchildren. Well, it worked! 70 years later, thousands of people on the internet are enjoying her efforts.
“I’ve always known about this suitcase ever since I was a little girl. My mom discovered it when she was a little older and she told me about it and she selflessly saved it for me and my sister for when we were of age,” said in an interview.
“I opened it up and I was just like, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’ because it really just brought back everything to me, especially memories — my grandfather passed about 21 years ago — so just those memories of my grandparents in that time in their life, it’s just really cool,” she added.
Her grandparents, the Donatos got married in 1952, and in May of the same year, they went on their honeymoon to New York which included spots in Manhattan such as The New Yorker Hotel.
“She was like, ‘I did not care because I was with my honey’ — that’s what she called my pop pop,” Bill said. “And she had just a wonderful time just being with him and really just taking it all in — that there was this time in their life where they could start a family and all these things she’d always dreamed of,” she ended.
When she posted a video of merely the suitcase, she had hundreds of comments prompting her to try on the dresses which she complied with. She tried on her grandmother’s dresses as well as her accessories.
Everything fit her perfectly. And she has noted how well preserved the clothes have been.
“It’s pretty cool how they’ve been so intact to this day, like it was 70 years ago [and] there’s elastic on some of the pieces and [they’re] still springy,” Madeline said.
The first piece she modeled for her followers was one that had fascinated her since she was a child. A black dress cinched at the waist with short sleeves. She reveals that she had always seen a picture of her grandmother in that dress while she was at the New Yorker hotel in her grandparent’s living room and it always caught her eye.
She also tried on a smart gray jacket and matching skirt with a sleeveless striped top which she explained her grandmother wore on the train to the big city. She clearly had great fashion sense!
She is happy to share a part of her grandmother with the world and show her what kind of a woman she is.
Madeline Bill says she has told her grandmother how popular she has gotten and that people all over the world are admiring her style.
“I definitely want to save it for someone. Maybe my future kid or someone special in my life that’s younger than me, because I mean, I don’t want it to just to be a current piece that is being worn, I want it to be savored for someone in my future too, like my grandmother did for me,” she said.
What a sweet story reminding us about the special bond a grandmother shares with her granddaughter!
Share this story to show everyone just how stylish we were in the 1950s!
