Helping a bride select her dream wedding dress can be an intimate process, says Christine Greenberg. You’re physically in someone’s space, helping them in and out of a dress, talking about childhood dreams and big-day emotions.

“Talking about money, talking about body image issues,” says Greenberg, who’s done this for 11 years as a co-owner of Urban Set Bride, a boutique in Richmond, Va.

“So the last thing that I want to do — as someone has fallen in love with themselves in a gown, and everyone is crying and we’re having this moment — is to start talking about politics and global trade policy.”

But tariffs have now entered the bridal fitting room.

Couples are discovering that almost all U.S. wedding dresses are made abroad — even if they’re designed in the States. And China is where most are stitched and embellished. According to the National Bridal Retailers Association, China accounts for a whopping 90% of the bridal gown market.

For a while, those Chinese-made wedding dresses faced a new tariff of 145% set by President Trump, which is now temporarily cut to 30% until July 9. The two countries are still negotiating, and brides are starting to pay up.

Jessica Kaplan from Boston arrived at her bridal appointment to a warning from store staff: all gowns now carry a tariff surcharge of 10% to 15% depending on the designer and their supply chain. Kaplan’s A-line dress with a sweetheart neckline and a long tail ended up on the lower end, but still cost an extra $150.

“It wasn’t detrimental,” she says, “but it was definitely a bummer on the day.”

Chelsea Diane Photography / Urban Set Bride co-owner Christine Greenberg says tariffs affect not only gowns, but many other imports needed at her Virginia store: veils, hairpieces, garment bags, hangers and even paper for the check-out register. “It adds up very quickly,” Greenberg says, “and we’re a small shop.”

Store owners struggle to budget

Unlike clothes bought off the rack, wedding gowns are usually special order. When someone buys a dress from Claire Landgraf’s Finery Bridal Chic in Rochester, Minn., the order may take six or eight months.

“So what’s the landscape of tariff charging going to look like in six to eight months? We don’t know,” she says.

Landgraf has already spent hundreds of dollars on tariffs for dresses that brides had ordered before Trump took office. What if the opposite happens now, and she charges brides a fee for a future tariff of an unclear amount?

“I don’t feel good as a business owner about saying, ‘Hey, Miss Bride who bought a gown at the top of her budget at $2,000 that included that tariff fee, months from now your gown came in and all of a sudden the tariff charge is another $300,'” Landgraf says. “I can’t do that to brides. So it’s just really, really uncertain.”

It’s not just gowns arriving from China, but also trims and crystals, veils and hair pieces, hangers and garment bags. Most designers, including the popular Grace Loves Lace and Revelry, have decided to simply raise prices across the board to cover new tariff costs. Some by as much as 30%. Many store owners have followed suit.

Landgraf, for now, is adding a surcharge that she can remove later if tariffs disappear — and budgeting for refunds.

Chelsea Diane Photography / Christine Greenberg sells wedding gowns at Urban Set Bride in Richmond, Va.

Double the cost for Made in the USA

U.S. brides — outside of big cities — on average spend less than $2,000 on a wedding dress, Landgraf and Greenberg estimate. American-made dresses tend to start around twice that price.

And not only are there few people buying them, but there are very few people making them.

“Unlike other industries, these dresses cannot be made in the United States,” the National Bridal Retailers Association wrote earlier this year in a lobbying letter to U.S. lawmakers, “as there is zero labor pool of skilled craftsmen that can hand-bead gowns with as many as 200,000 sequins, beads, and crystals.”

One of Trump’s arguments for tariffs is to jump-start more American manufacturing. But U.S. textile and garment-making prowess faded decades ago. It would take many years to train enough technicians in lace work or embroidery to dress legions of American brides.

“My dad was in the Army for 24 years — I would love to purchase American-made wedding gowns,” says Greenberg, the Virginia shopkeeper. “But they don’t really exist, certainly not at the price point that the average American consumer could purchase a wedding gown.”

And so, some of the most popular U.S. gown makers, including Utah-based Maggie Sottero and Tennessee-based Allure, have urged the federal government to exempt formalwear from tariffs, saying instead of bringing back jobs, tariffs would shutter businesses.

Mania Babakhani/Rachel & Rose Bridal / Chelsea Ritchie is a tariff-season bride from Los Angeles, unsure how much to budget for new surcharges or price increases.

Saying maybe to the dress

The price uncertainty has more brides hesitating to say yes to the dress.

Shoppers used to visit once or twice before buying their gowns, Landgraf says. Now she’s seeing more “multiple-visit brides,” as people shop around longer.

“This has been one of the slowest seasons that I have had from a buying standpoint since COVID,” she says.

Brides are commiserating on social media, reassessing their wedding finances and trying to think outside the box.

“I’m kind of curious about — what if I get, like, a dressmaker?” says Chelsea Ritchie, another tariff-season bride, in Los Angeles. “You know, buy the materials, buy the fabric and see if somebody can make me a dress within the same price.”

Her dream dress is dazzling white with a mermaid silhouette, flaring dramatically at the bottom. It’s likely her fabric and materials would still have to be imported.

Boutiques are warning her that dress orders might take longer than nine months to arrive, as some designers are making the gambit to hold their shipments from China, banking on tariffs to fade out. One shop told Ritchie to expect a surcharge. Another said prices might rise later this summer.

“It does give me a little anxiety,” Ritchie says. “I try not to overly think too much about it, but it’s already been such a year for people, I mean, we can barely afford eggs, let’s be honest. And now it means that I need to budget more just in case.”

She says she feels like the people who rushed to buy cars ahead of tariffs on automakers — except it’s a showstopper gown and one more thing to stress about during the joys of wedding planning.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Deadline nears for Taiwan’s Chinese immigrants to prove no China household registration

toggle caption Chang Chih-yuan

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The clock is ticking for roughly 12,000 Chinese immigrants in Taiwan, who have until Monday to prove they’ve given up their household registration in China. Failure to meet the deadline could mean losing residency rights, according to Taiwan’s government — and possible deportation.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council announced the June 30 deadline in April amid a wave of national security measures after President Lai Ching-te labeled China a “hostile foreign force.” Lai’s administration wants to strengthen defenses against Chinese influence, but many immigrants worry it could come at a personal cost.

Chang Chih-yuan, a 34-year-old footwear designer, was born in China to a Chinese mother and Taiwanese father, and arrived in Taiwan when he was four years old. He has lived in Taiwan ever since, serving five years in the military.

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On April 8, Chang’s mother received a letter from Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency asking her to prove she had given up her household registration in China. After contacting the immigration agency, Chang says he learned he faced the same requirement. In both Taiwan and China, a person’s household registration ties their legal identity and access to public services to a specific place.

According to the Mainland Affairs Council, most affected immigrants are women like Chang’s mother, who were born in China and married Taiwanese men. Some, like Chang, immigrated as children.

The National Immigration Agency estimates about 140,000 Chinese spouses hold permanent residency in Taiwan, a democratic, self-governing island which China claims as its territory.

After receiving the letter, Chang’s mother, who wanted to be identified by her surname Liang, said, “I cried for two days. After living in Taiwan for three decades, if my Taiwanese household registration was canceled now… Wouldn’t I be a person without a country?” Even though she met the deadline set by Taiwan, she asked NPR not to use her full name because she fears that either Taiwan or China could deny her residency rights in the future.

She took a month off work to travel to China and obtain proof that she and her son no longer held household registration in Guangdong province. This required submitting sensitive documents like their Taiwanese IDs and home addresses to Chinese authorities — a risky but necessary step, she said.

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In late May, they received confirmation from the immigration agency their documents were accepted as proof of having given up residency in China.

As of June 23, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said nearly 5,200 of the roughly 12,000 affected immigrants had submitted proof of no longer having Chinese residency. Around 2,400 requested extensions or reported difficulties.

Lin Xuan-yue, a graphic designer living in Taipei, is the daughter of a woman from Jiangxi, in southern China, who married a Taiwanese man she met in Shenzhen, China, before moving to Taiwan in the late 1990s. In April, Lin’s mother received a similar letter from the immigration agency requesting proof that she gave up her Chinese household registration. Having lived for so long in Taiwan, she didn’t know what to do. The family is still discussing their options.

“I understand the government’s intent — to protect national security,” Lin told NPR in a text message. “But the way this policy is being implemented feels rushed and deeply unfair to immigrants. My mom still hasn’t submitted the documents. She may even be deregistered as a resident. What does that mean? That her past 20-something years here don’t count? That raising children, paying taxes and living her life on this island still isn’t enough — because now she has to be reevaluated to see if she ‘deserves’ to stay?”

Legal scholar Fan Hsiu-yu of National Taiwan University notes that some immigrants may have lost important documents years ago — or see the prospect of returning to China and dealing with authorities there as a personal risk.

Following public outcry, the day after its initial announcement, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council announced some immigrants unable to supply the documents could submit an affidavit declaring they do not hold Chinese household registration. But this option only applies to those unwilling to return to China, Fan explains, as such affidavits lose force if an immigrant ever re-enters China. She also notes the restriction on holding Chinese household registration applies to native-born Taiwanese citizens as well.

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The Mainland Affairs Council has not clarified whether it will deport those who fail to meet the June 30 deadline. But Fan and other legal experts say deportation is a possibility for immigrants who lose residency rights in Taiwan. In a statement, the Mainland Affairs Council “calls on the parties concerned not to test the government’s determination.” Last week, it also stated that as long as immigrants who miss the June deadline “show a positive attitude and submit relevant needs and explanations as soon as possible,” the government won’t immediately revoke their right to live in Taiwan.

Ruling party legislator Huang Jie, whose committee oversees the Mainland Affairs Council, says removing immigrants’ residency “should be used only as a last resort.”

toggle caption Huang Jie

Fellow Democratic Progressive Party legislator Puma Shen explains that most naturalized citizens in Taiwan must give up their original citizenship. But under Taiwan’s constitution, mainland China is not treated as a fully separate country. The constitution was first adopted in 1947 by the Republic of China government, which retreated to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war, and has been amended several times since.

“Under the law, we can’t ask Chinese immigrants to give up their nationality. So the closest thing we can do is ask them to give up their Chinese household registration,” Shen said. “It’s about risk management. I know many love our country. But a small number are involved in espionage or other activities on behalf of the [Chinese Communist Party]. Our job is to draw a red line between those two groups.”

Shen added that the requirement was based on a law that has been on the books since 2004, but wasn’t universally enforced.

Taiwan’s opposition parties hold a combined majority in the legislature, and have voted to reduce defense spending.

“Without a majority in the legislature, it’s difficult for us to pass new laws. So enforcing existing laws is the only way we can further protect our national security,” Shen said.

William Yang, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, says the policy likely responds to a wave of high-level espionage cases uncovered in March. But the cases show China’s infiltration “has already reached very deep into Taiwan’s civil society,” he says, beyond Chinese immigrants to many native-born Taiwanese at the highest levels of government and the military.

toggle caption Ashish Valentine

“If they continue to publicize this campaign, that is going to stigmatize these people,” he says, referring to Chinese immigrants, “and unfortunately deepen existing divisions in Taiwan.”

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Recently, Taiwan deported three Chinese immigrants for posting videos promoting “armed unification” with China.

Liu Jun-liang, director of the Taipei-based Immigrant Youth Advocacy Front, has been helping dozens of Chinese immigrants with the deadline by helping them find documents and understand the government’s regulations. He calls the new policy unfair and lacking transparency, and says it has heightened existing mistrust towards Chinese immigrants, “making them victims of cross-strait tensions.”

Opposition KMT lawmaker Chen Yu-zhen represents Kinmen, an island just a few miles from China and home to many Chinese immigrants. Chen calls the new policy unconstitutional and illegal, and has received many complaints from her constituents. Unlike Taiwan’s ruling party, the KMT favors closer ties with China.

toggle caption Ashish Valentine for NPR

Chen says many immigrants have lived in Taiwan for decades, and some now refuse to comply with the policy despite government warnings to not test its determination. “Many of them want to see who’s the last one standing,” she said. “They are furious.”

Chen warns that targeting Chinese immigrants would undermine Taiwan’s reputation for human rights in the eyes of Chinese citizens. “If people in China see Taiwan no longer upholds these values, they may question whether democracy is a good thing after all.”

Sharon Lin contributed to this report from Taipei.

On-air challenge

This is a summertime puzzle. I’m going to give you three words starting with the letters H, O, and T. For each set you give me a word that can precede each of mine to complete a compound word or a familiar two-word phrase.

Example: Heat, Oven, Tank –> GAS (gas heat, gas oven, gas tank)

1. Hampshire, Orleans, Testament

2. Horse, Otter, Turtle

3. Hydrant, Opal, Truck

4. Hopes, Octane, Tide

5. Hard, Out, Torch

6. House, Onion, Thumb

7. Heavyweight, Opera, Touch

8. Hand, Order, Term

9. Hole, Olive, Tie

10. Hawk, Owl, Time

11. Havana, Ones, Toe

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge comes from listener Bob Weisz. Take the name of a major film director. Drop the last six letters of his name, and rearrange what remains. You’ll get the name of a major film award — for which this director has been nominated six times. Who is he and what is the award?

Challenge answer

Pedro Almodóvar, Palme d’Or.

Winner

Elisabeth Larsen

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Andrew Chaikin, of San Francisco. Think of a famous movie star (6 letters, 6 letters). The first name, when said out loud, sounds like a brand of a certain object. The last name is someone who uses this object. What movie star is this?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, DATE DATE at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Copyright 2025 NPR

AMMAN, Jordan — Roxana, a young shop manager living alone in Tehran, was panicking during the war with Israel. Her family lives outside the Iranian capital. Her boyfriend was on an Iranian base doing compulsory military service; unreachable and potentially in danger. Even her psychotherapist had fled the bombing in Tehran. So she turned to ChatGPT.

“I asked it, can you give me a specific time when this is going to end?” says Roxana, 31, reached by phone in Tehran. She did not want her full name used because she is afraid of being arrested by Iranian security services for speaking to foreign media.

The war that began on June 13 with Israeli attacks against Iranian nuclear sites lasted for 12 days. Iran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles on Israel. The two countries agreed to a ceasefire Tuesday after the U.S. bombed Iranian sites, prompting an Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Qatar.

It was the third or fourth day of the war and explosions sounded like they were getting closer when Roxana tried the artificial intelligence app, she says.

“It gave me some information that was new to me, like the Islamic Republic’s attempts to lobby the international community,” she says. “It said it might take 10 or 12 more days.”

Narges Keshavarznia, an internet access researcher at Filterwatch, a project of the U.S.-based digital rights organization Miaan Group, said even though ChatGPT is restricted in Iran, Iranians have been able to access it through specific internet proxies.

Atta Kenare / AFP via Getty Images / AFP via Getty Images A man stands on the roof of a building while watching the horizon in Tehran on June 16. Iran’s state broadcaster was briefly knocked off the air by an Israeli strike and explosions rang out across Tehran that day.

Iran was in the midst of an internet blackout for hours a day. For some reason, she says, her building had better access than most and ChatGPT was accessible when Google and other search engines were not. When she asked if her building would be targeted or her loved ones killed, it had no good answers. But it tried to give her security advice, she says, including where to shelter in her apartment.

She had consulted the artificial intelligence app so often it knew what her apartment looked like, down to the location of the furniture. When the war started, ChatGPT became her security advisor, telling her where the safest room in her home was, and when she suffered panic attacks, it became her therapist.

“I used to speak a lot to it and it knows me,” she says. “By just telling me that ‘this is only a nervous attack and it will pass,’ it helped me a lot,” she says. “I shared my anxieties with it, my financial concerns and worries.”

As useful and empathetic-seeming as it was to Roxana, AI chat bots and artificially generated images have also been sources of misinformation and influence campaigns, especially during conflict.

Roxana says it was always difficult to get information in Iran — many news sites are blocked and she says Iran’s state media cannot be trusted.

“On their state media, they are trying to show you know, everything is OK and it’s so beautiful and it’s like we live in a garden or something,” she says. “And that makes me even angrier. On Iranian TV it was like ‘the war was over’ and we’d won since the second day.”

The frequent internet blackouts made getting any information even more difficult. Iranian media reported that authorities had temporarily blocked internet access to maintain security during the Israeli attacks.

Roxana says she could hear bombs in the distance when she spoke to her therapist as she was fleeing Tehran. The therapist told her to try not to think of the past or the future and suggested she keep a journal.

In a huge city beloved by most Iranians but little-known in the West, Roxana wrote of missing bookstores and French pastries.

Her day-to-day life before the war would also be surprising to many unfamiliar with Iran.

Vahid Salemi / AP / AP People walk through the old main bazaar of Tehran, Iran, on a Saturday night, Oct. 19, 2024.

She describes going to concerts with friends, staying out late and drinking. Although alcohol is banned in the Islamic Republic and public drinking not tolerated, home-brewed alcohol is widely available. Her friends are creatives, and in a country where a cleric is the supreme authority, many of them atheists. She covers her mass of curly hair only when she has to, primarily to access government offices, which enforce mandatory hair covering for women.

Years of U.S. sanctions and the Iranian government’s own policies have left Iran in financial crisis. A World Bank study two years ago found that 40% of Iranians were at risk of falling into poverty. The country’s relatively young population — more than 60% are under 30 years old — have been hit particularly hard by high unemployment and underemployment.

Much of Roxana’s life and that of her friends is spent figuring out how to make ends meet.

“I feel like we are the forgotten people,” she says. While the rich in Iran are fine and the destitute have a safety net, she says people like her — the working poor — fall through the cracks.

“We are trying hard to stand on our feet, not to need anyone. But life is getting harder and harder,” she says. “Now when I receive bills I just look at them and I’m like ‘go to hell.’ There’s nothing I can do about them.”

She says the food in her apartment is from friends; vegetables and a big bag of rice her boyfriend bought before he had to report for duty.

Where once, not long ago, Roxana had been studying German with hopes of emigrating and working on improving her skills to produce online content, she says she has abandoned all that.

“There’s a lot of pressure on us to take a political side,” she says. “But people like me just want to have a calm, peaceful life.”

Iran says more than 600 Iranians were killed during the almost two weeks of war. The Israeli government says Iranian airstrikes killed 28 people in Israel.

Roxana says because she can’t sleep, she often stays up all night playing computer games and then sleeps in the day. She has started playing Life is Strange, an adventure game in which the main character can rewind time.

Roxana says she turned to Life is Strange after her The Sims account where she created a virtual life was hacked at the start of the war and she lost access.

“The family I had built there, all the life I had built for these characters, it’s lost,” she says. “I couldn’t save the family that I made there.”

Writing on social media after the ceasefire, she says she and a group of friends gathered in her apartment in the strange silence after the sirens stopped. There was some relief and nervous laughter but mostly sadness about what their lives had become.

She says they hadn’t asked for much.

“A little bit of bread, a little bit of joy, a little bit of dreams, a little bit of rights, a little bit of…” she writes, leaving the thought unfinished.

Sima Ghadirzadeh contributed reporting from Istanbul.

Copyright 2025 NPR

In this series, NPR takes readers behind the news and explains how we do our journalism. Here, Meghan Ashford-Grooms, an editor on the standards team, describes how NPR thinks about unnamed sources.

How are the Trump administration’s layoffs affecting federal agencies? What impact did the U.S. bombing of Iran have on its nuclear facilities? What is it like to be a Ukrainian soldier fighting in the war with Russia?

Those are all questions that journalists at NPR, and elsewhere, have relied on anonymous sources — people who do not want their names used in a story — to try to answer.

So, how does NPR decide when to allow sources to go unnamed? And why?

NPR’s strong preference is for the people who give our journalists information to be “on the record” — meaning they agree to be named as sources in our stories.

But sometimes people with vital information are afraid they risk being fired from their jobs or being jailed for speaking to a reporter. In other cases, someone might want to share details of a traumatic or sensitive experience they had — a sexual assault or a difficult medical procedure — but want to avoid the stigma that being publicly identified could bring.

In those situations, NPR considers granting the source anonymity. NPR uses information from anonymous sources to tell important stories that otherwise would go unreported. And only specific senior editors can sign off on their use.

When deciding whether to OK a request for anonymity, these editors strive to balance NPR’s commitment to transparency — that is, telling our audiences where we get our information — against the harm a source faces for speaking to us. One way they do that is by vetting the source with the story’s producers, reporters and editors to answer several important questions:

Is the source’s information or perspective important for the public to know? And is this source the only way for the reporter to get it?

Is the source credible and reliable? Are they who they say they are, and are they in a position to know what they say they know?

Do they face consequences that could negatively affect their life or their livelihood?

Only if the request meets the criteria above is anonymity granted.

If NPR does allow an anonymous source to be used, we provide a clear, specific reason — in the story — for allowing the person to go unnamed. We also aim to tell our listeners and readers as much as we can about the unnamed source without including details that could make them identifiable. That language might look like this: “according to a senior State Department official who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.” Or like this: “The woman, who lives in Arizona, asked that NPR not use her name because she is in the U.S. without legal status and fears being deported.”

In some cases, a source will agree to allow NPR to refer to them by their first or middle name, or even by one of their initials. Those sources go through the same vetting process as those who don’t want any part of their name used.

One thing that our readers and listeners won’t find in an NPR story is pseudonyms, because those are made up and we want to report only facts.

Here are some recent stories that highlight NPR’s approach to anonymous sources:

And more information is in NPR’s ethics handbook , available online at npr.org/ethics.

Copyright 2025 NPR