Kelly Ripa Rewore Her Wedding Dress to Celebrate Her 20th Anniversary

Kelly Ripa, with hubby Mark Consuelos, in “the dress” over the weekend. (Photo: ABC)

Kelly Ripa returned to Live! With Kelly and Michael earlier today — and morning TV was right again. After her candid monologue detailing her impromptu hiatus from the morning show, with a few jabs at the Mickey Mouse network, she shared how she spent the last few days, when she wasn’t dealing with work drama, on a getaway for her 20th wedding anniversary.

Kelly went to Turks and Caicos with hubby (and future Live! co-host?) Mark Consuelos and their three children — Michael, 18, Lola, 14, and Joaquin, 13 — and brought along “something old,” in the form of her wedding dress, to wear.

“That’s my wedding dress. And guess what, it still fits!” the superfit blonde said while sharing a snapshot of herself, next to Mark, while rocking the floor-length, curve-hugging gown. She then detailed how she found the dress on the cheap.

“The dress is 25 years old. My marriage is 20 years old,” she explained. “I didn’t buy it as a wedding dress. I just bought it because it was really pretty, and I wanted to buy something from the Barney’s Warehouse sale. I was working the soap. I didn’t make a lot of money. It was $199 on final clearance sale. ‘Do I eat this week, or do I get this dress.’ Literally, this was the thought process.”

She certainly got her money’s worth. “I said to myself, ‘I bet if I buy this maybe it will be an investment piece. Maybe I will wear it more than once.’ I swear to you I wear it constantly,” she said. “It’s a beach cover up now. I wear it all the time. It was the best $199 I ever spent in my life.”

Here are Kelly and Mark on their big day in 1996. The dress has had quite a life. (Photo: Twitter)

While co-stars on “the soap” — that would be All My Children, which she was on from 1990 until 2001 — Ripa and Consuelos, who were on-screen love interests, secretly fell in love behind the scenes. Ripa has said that they were “never engaged.” On a Tuesday in 1996, they realized they had Wednesday and Thursday off, so they did what any two crazy kids in love would — flew to Las Vegas and got hitched. They didn’t tell anyone at first, but eventually the news slowly leaked out to the soap press.

We love that she wears the dress “all the time,” especially as a beach cover-up, though — with all this ABC drama — we’re sure she’ll be getting a big bonus later this year (for not outright leaving the show), so she should feel free to pick up a few new things.