Wedding Blog

Like many brides before me, I have had major indecision when it comes to what shoes to wear with my dress. Since my dress is short, my shoes are going to be featured prominently throughout the day—in other words, I can’t screw this one up!

Originally I picked out some beautiful red satin shoes from Victoria’s Secret online. I loved them—they flattered my feet and would have provided a gorgeous pop of color.

Then, we chose our first color scheme, pomegranate and gold, and decided the red just wouldn’t look right.

I picked the next pair because the gold color seemed like a no-brainer for a pom and gold color scheme.

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I liked them, so I kept them for several months. Even after we changed our color scheme to include pale pink and cream, these shoes still fit right in. However, I started to think that they just didn’t stand out enough. And then I kept seeing pictures like these.

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I wanted to get in on the ankle strap trend! I happened to be looking for some shoes for another formal event when I found these beauts.

They’re Steve Madden from DSW. They come in a cream color, too, but the material was leather and not satin like these. I bought them for the event and then decided after the fact that I might as well wear them for the wedding, too! So what if there’s no purple in my wedding? My feet will stand out!

I caved in to another trend as well: matching grooms’ socks. After seeing a few pictures like this one, I really couldn’t resist.

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I know the argyle trend is getting pretty popular, but I kept picturing socks with horizontal stripes in gray and the same purple as my shoes. Let me just tell you right now that finding men’s socks that fit that description was easier said than done! I searched online through basically every retailer I could think of, starting with the basics: Target, J. Crew, Gap, Banana Republic, Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom’s, Dillard’s, and Old Navy. Only the edgier stores had anything even close to what I was looking for. Then I attempted frantic Google searches, which took me to places like Happy Socks and this interesting blog all about men’s footwear, Manolo for the Men.

I finally checked American Apparel and found some socks that seemed like they might work: they were described as striped dark heather gray and violet, but there were no pictures of those colors. I started to order the socks anyway, but they wanted to charge $7 for shipping. What? The next day, I hit up both American Apparel retail locations here in Austin, and I found the purple and gray socks at the second one—success! As a bonus, the socks were $3 less in the store than they were online. So I saved $10, or half the price, by buying in the store!

The Dude is cool with wearing the socks, though I’m fairly sure he thought I had gone crazy at one point while searching frantically for them. Here is a picture of them, in all their striped-y glory.

If you’re looking for bright socks for your groom, I’d recommend Urban Outfitters, American Apparel, or Happy Feet. They had the most choices. Target also had a few bright-colored argyle and striped socks in store, but none on their website.

Sounds like a happy ending, right? Wrong. Just when I thought the Dude and I had the perfect footwear, I had to go and rethink the purple shoes.