Weddingbee Blog

When I first started lusting after The Perfect Dress for our (non)wedding, I was dead-set on three things:

1. Finding perfect, cute, city-hall appropriate but still wedding-y/classy dress that looks hot/sexy/stylish/modern/vintage on me
2. Not spending a lot of money
3. Feeling like this dress is “the one”, and not just “one that looks good enough”

(Gee, that should be easy, right? Hah.)

I’m a healthy weight, but I’m taller than average, and let’s just say… this baby’s got back. I can look overweight if I wear the wrong styles, and like many women, I suffer from unfounded self-esteem issues. I first tested the wedding-dress waters with a friend (and fellow bride-to-be). I was glad to have my friend with me. I’m so self-deprecating all the time that it was important to have a good girlfriend there to give me an honest opinion about whether I looked h-o-t (or n-o-t). I tried to do the same for her.

We’d both heard terrible things about one local store, and she had a bad experience at the other one. So, we decided to go 75 miles south to Fargo/Moorhead. She made appointments for us at two well-known stores. One was a local/regional boutique, and the other was David’s Bridal. The boutique wouldn’t permit photo taking. There were big prohibitive signs everywhere. This was a real issue for me because I wanted to involve my mom in the dress-shopping process and she lives across the country from me. I had anticipated possible photo-hate, however, and had brought a very small and inconspicuous camera with me for this reason. We sent our attendant (who was very nice) off on a few wild goose chases to keep her occupied so we could snap pics of the gowns.

I only have a (blurry) photo of me in one dress from the boutique, and it was much too fancy/heavy for me for what we’re planning. I was, however, drawn to the layers. (I don’t know the designer of this dress. I think it was exclusive to this store though; PM me if you want to know the name of the boutique.)

My friend had much more luck at the boutique than I did. She found several options for her wedding (including a couple of gorgeous and heavily discounted Pronovias gowns (one was $900!). I didn’t really care for the place, mainly because they didn’t have much of anything in my size (and I’m NOT an uncommon size). The attendant originally told me to go 1-2 sizes up from my street size, yet they had so few of those sizes that she kept bringing me dresses that were my street size or smaller.

The store also had very few simpler “destination” styles, so the attendant put me in a lot of fancy, sparkly ball gowns she thought I might like. (Maybe some brides would consider these gowns to be low-key, but not me.) She’d cram me in to these too-small dresses as best she could, causing great discomfort. While I looked pretty, I didn’t look like “me”. Maybe it’s because I’ve never dreamed of being a princess; I looked in the mirror and didn’t see myself as a beautiful bride. The big dresses were very heavy, itchy and uncomfortable, and I thought I looked awkward and false.

The highlight of my experience in this store was when the attendant wedged me in to one princessy A-line gown and the zipper jammed. She could not get me out. She got another attendant and the two of them couldn’t even do it. Can you guess what happened next? They had to cut me out of it. Yes, they got a big pair of scissors and cut me out of a nearly $3,000 gown. Normally I’d be mortified by something like this… but I actually found it quite funny given the circumstances. I felt bad that they had to cut the dress, but the woman had squeezed me into a dress that was way too small and not my style, after all. I was tempted to reveal that we had a camera just so my friend could snap a photo of this momentous occasion. Alas, we had to get dressed and head over to our next appointment.

Our next stop was David’s Bridal. Hallelujah, they let us take photos! I had some limited luck at this store, whereas my friend didn’t find anything that screamed “the one”. I had been to their website and had a few favorites that I hoped would look great. Unfortunately I wasn’t impressed with them once I put them on, but this experience was very helpful. I at least got to see that these dresses - previously strong contenders in my mind - were not going to work with me.

My friend and I are both curvy in different places and somehow we both looked flat and shapeless in the Galina VW9340 dress. I had really loved this dress in the photo too. Darn.

[source; We didn’t take any photos of us in this dress.]

Next was the T9612. This is the dress on the cover of David’s spring 2009 catalog. This was a comfortable, well-fitting dress. It wowed me on the model. On me… it looked nice, fit well, and was comfortable… but “Wow”? Not so much. It was very sparkly in person too. I’m not opposed to a little sparkle, but I think this was too much. It was also too short for me, hanging over an inch off the ground when I was barefoot (I’m 5’10″). The attendant said it could not be hemmed due to the lace detailing, but she thought a longer length could be ordered. Here it is:

[source (left)]

Moving on… one that surprised me was the SV9563. I hadn’t noticed it on the web (I think because the model looked emaciated and angry). It stood out on the mannequin in the store, so I asked to try it on.

[source (left)]

I really liked this dress. It was comfortable and had a vintage flair. I wish I’d taken a detail picture of the beaded waistband: it was extremely intricate and pretty. The fabric had me a little worried though; it was clingy and often, clingy doesn’t flatter my curves particularly well. Still, I left the store with this dress on my mind as the only viable option thus far.

When I sent the photos from the day to my mom, she liked the T9612, but agreed about the sparkles being too much. And she did not care for the SV9563 at all. She didn’t think it was particularly flattering and didn’t think it was my style either. I admit, I was a little unhappy with the way my stomach looked in the dress, but that wasn’t the dress’s fault, it was mine for eating at Olive Garden before the dress appointments! However, I very much value my mother’s opinion - she knows me pretty well and she’s usually right - so I decided to keep looking. It’s not like this dress was on the low end of my budget. While it was very reasonable for a wedding dress, it was pretty expensive for a city hall wedding dress.

With about five and a half months before the big day, I’d hit the two biggest bridal stores in the area and had nothing to show for it. No stress there! (Yeah, sure.) Perhaps this is a good lesson for other non-traditional brides: if you don’t want an expensive, intricate, billowy, beaded, or tulle-filled wedding dress, don’t limit your shopping to wedding dress stores!

How did your first dress-shopping trip go? Were you somewhat successful like my friend, or did you come home empty-handed and discouraged like I did?

Up next… mom and I hit up the biggest store on Earth: The Internet!