A real-deal dress

I’m not so much a fan of “wedding dresses.” I find the vast majority of wedding dresses to be utterly ridiculous, unflattering, stupid and idiotically expensive. Some gowns resemble doilies, some drown the bride in mounds of billowing fabric, and others weigh her down with heavy fabrics and innumerable beads, buttons, rhinestones and bobbles. Generally, they make me think one of following:

1. This is what a five-year-old’s pretty princess fantasy is and because it is your wedding day it is suddenly encouraged to manifest this juvenile fantasy at an incredible cost.
2. How is it that while other fashions have changed, the “wedding” gown still usually resembles the dresses from centuries past?
3. You look like a cupcake.

As you might imagine I’ve not been terribly excited to look for dresses. My inner-pretty-princess gives me a shot of glee for time to time, but usually I’ve just felt overwhelmed by the thousands and thousands of hideous, immorally expensive options before me. I went to a bridal boutique downtown and had a panic put into me when I found out that it takes at least four months to get your dress and it is better to order six months or more in advance. (*The wedding is in less than six months at this point.)

I tried going to stores like Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Ave and designer boutiques to see if I could find something good for a wedding that wasn’t necessarily an official wedding dress, but I didn’t find anything that I liked. I then started to put out feelers for people who might be able to make me a dress and thought that would probably be the route I would take.

Meanwhile, my aunt was very excited to take me dress shopping. I was actually up for it, but mostly because I wanted to get a sense of what shapes I liked and how different fabrics fell so I could get onto having a dress made. We decided to take two hours Saturday afternoon to start to explore. We ended up spending five hours at three separate stores and I tried on dozens of dresses.

For the most part I had a hard time finding things that were simple and straight-forward, but with the help of some nice “wedding consultants” and “bridal consultants” (aka “sales clerks”) we found some relatively sane dresses. In general though the gowns were just sort of blah – mostly overwhelming, mostly really uncomfortable and mostly insanely expensive. There were a couple that I liked, but nothing that was fantastic by any means.

Finally we reached the last dress at the last store at the end of the day. It was one of those things that takes a few minutes to wrap around, lash down and button up. I pulled it up and sort of held it on me but was thinking, “nah.” It had too much fabric that was too heavy, too much train, and it seemed too fussy. My aunt was lurking around the corner to see if a dress another girl had been trying on was available and unsure if I should take the dress off, change back into my regular clothes or what, I just sort of stood there in a stupor. I didn’t really care to try the dress on, but the “wedding consultant” kept lacing and buttoning and tying and what all until next thing you know I was wearing the dress so why not give it a look?

I went to the big mirror and thought incredulously, “whoa, that actually looks really good.” My aunt came around the corner and said, “wow, that looks really good.” The wedding consultant came over and said, “Wow, that looks really amazing.” None of us had said anything like this about any of the other dresses. I sat in it, walked around in it, looked at it from a bunch of angles, took pictures from a bunch of angles, and from every perspective I could think of it seemed to work. It is relatively simple, comfortable, cheap and easy to hem, makes my figure look dynamite and is a really good price. It is also pretty and fun.

I’ve shown the pictures to a variety of family members and when comparing photos of the dress with other dresses I tried on the universal reaction has been, “hmm… hmm… oh that’s nice… hmmm…” when looking at the earlier ones. Then when the photos of me in this dress come up, “OH MY GOD I LOVE IT!”, or something similar, is the typical reaction.

So despite my lack of enthusiasm it seems that I’ve found a real wedding dress. Go figure. I’d attach a picture of it, but we can’t ruin the surprise for those of you coming to the wedding now! Never mind running the risk that my Christopher might see it!