Weddingbee Blog

the original dream bridesmaid dress

I’m having two bridesmaids for my wedding. One is my childhood best friend, we’ll call her M, and the other is a gal also from my hometown and a roommate in college, T. M lives in Indy. T lives in London.

So I have two bridesmaids, who live on different continents and have different fashion sensibilities.

T is trendy/Bohemian and M is more classic all-American. I thought I could make this easy on them by saying, “go find a dress you like in a shade of light-ish pink!” Surely I was being progressive and would be completely loved by all.

Apparently, finding a light pinkish dress was not so easy. There are many shades of light pink at various stores and some are less appealing than others. Realizing that I was already being a cruel bride by choosing light pink as their dress color, I should have just put the girls out of their misery and picked an option myself.

Ha! It’s impossible. A dress under $200 that is flattering and a little fashionable doesn’t exist, I think. Or at least in light pink. The Vera Wang pictured above was lovely (and blogged by Scissors here) but out of our budget.

After much whimpering and whining, I changed their dress color to a bright alpine green. Hooray. (If you recall, I resisted green at first until I found a suitable shade). Both of the bridesmaids turned out to be thrilled by this color, which makes me very happy.

So, after more searching and finding that nice bridesmaid dresses were simply expensive, we decided to have the dresses made. A seamstress in Indiana will charge about 40 per dress, which is cheap. We just need to buy the fabric and she can work from a photo. This seamstress has sewn some other bridesmaid’s dresses that I’ve seen, so I have full faith in her ability!

Well, the fabric. Last week I stopped in a really amazing fabric store out in the ‘burbs. It had Juicy Couture fabric, for instance! They had some really beautiful silks in a wide range of colors, including my particular green, but get this: it cost $50/yard. Yikes. So I have to find some tissue taffeta on the cheap.

But what, pray tell, are the designs for the girls?

For the boho chic T (and I Photoshopped it with the accurate shade of green):

(source)

And for M, the classic, this:

(source)

How did you negotiate between a small bridesmaid dress budget and a big love for fashion?