Beaded Reem Acra Gown Named 2025 Vegas Wedding Dress of the Year

A beaded, 1920s-inspired Reem Acra gown, discovered secondhand at a Beverly Hills shop and worn for a ceremony inside The Mob Museum, has been named the 2025 Vegas Wedding Dress of the Year. The dress, belonging to Stephanie Bashall of Burbank, California, was unveiled Monday afternoon at the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum on the second level of Terminal 1 at Harry Reid International Airport, where it will remain on display throughout 2026.

Bashall wore the gown when she married Britt Chandler Johnson on Oct. 26, 2025, at The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement in Downtown Las Vegas. She had found the Reem Acra piece at Glamour Closet, a secondhand store in Beverly Hills, giving the gown a second life well beyond its original runway context. On display alongside the dress are Bashall's rhinestone-encrusted, blue-soled Betsey Johnson heels, the accessories completing the full picture of how the look came together on the day.

The gown beat out dozens of entries submitted through the Clark County Clerk's Wedding Capital of the World Las Vegas wedding tourism initiative. To enter, brides posted a photograph and a short narrative on social media describing the story behind their dress and ceremony. Eligibility required that the wedding have taken place in Clark County, Nevada during the 2025 calendar year. A panel drawn from the Clark County Clerk's Office, the Vegas Wedding Chamber, members of the local fashion community, and the Las Vegas Fashion Council reviewed the submissions before selecting Bashall's entry.

Clark County Clerk Lynn Marie Goya, who joined officials from Harry Reid International Airport, The Mob Museum, the Vegas Wedding Chamber, and the Las Vegas Fashion Council at the unveiling, was direct about why this particular gown stood apart. "This was the one that was selected as the epitome of the 2025 Las Vegas wedding dress of the year," Goya said. "It has a story. It has a personality. It has a gorgeous dress. It has a great location. So, it really was a special dress."

For Goya, the airport setting amplifies the message. "Weddings and people in their wedding dresses walking up and down the Strip are such a part of the personality of Las Vegas," she said, describing Harry Reid International as "the gateway to all of Las Vegas" and noting that displaying the dress there shows that "weddings really are part of our heart and soul."

The choice of a thrifted Reem Acra speaks to something worth noting in the current bridal landscape: the most visually compelling dress in the room is not always the one sourced from a flagship boutique. The silhouette, with its beadwork rooted in 1920s language, would read beautifully under the Mob Museum's atmospheric interiors. That it traveled from a Beverly Hills secondhand rack to a civic display case at one of the country's busiest airports only deepens the story the dress is now telling to every traveler arriving in Las Vegas.