Weddingbee Blog

Does this look like a sweetheart top to you? For those of you less inclined on the sewing machine, I’ll answer for you: no, it does not look like a sweetheart top.

I’m sure you are wondering why I am so anti-bridal shop.

To be fair, Spiffy chose this particular bridal shop because they were the only salon willing to order her dress without her buying it first. So there’s one thing going for them. However, when we went to order our bridesmaid’s dresses, it was an entirely different story. The store was adamant that we not schedule our appointment too close to their lunch hour. Knowing what looks good on my body, I thought an hour before their lunch would suffice. When we arrived, no one helped us…for 40 minutes. There were no other customers in the store. If you’ve ever been to a bridal salon, all the dresses are shoved onto racks and you cannot just walk in and find the one you’ve been eyeing online without some assistance. One of her BMs and I were able to find dresses that we enjoyed in time for the assistant to come down and measure us. We had just filled out the receipts when I compared the dresses to the other 2 BMs dresses and realized they were another shade of brown. At that point it was 20 minutes before their lunch, and the assistant said, “you won’t see that in the pictures.” Like hell you won’t. So, we started the search again, with an encouraging eye roll from the assistant. Can I even use the word assistant anymore? She assisted us in nothing until this point. We found dresses and paid for them in time for the store to close for their lunch.

As a side note, never joke about an unplanned pregnancy when they are ordering your dress, because of course they are going to order a size or two up. There were some alterations that needed to be done to the sides of my dress, so in order to make dresses fit nicely, a talented seamstress may also take in the princess seams (the seams that extend from your nipple down).  Needless to say, the rouching on the dress was all sorts of ugly. Making alterations to a dress a few days before a wedding was not fun, FYI.

To top off the wonderful experience, the day before the wedding we picked up Spiffy’s dress. They told her to arrive anytime after 2PM. It was 4PM, and the girls gave Spiffy a huge attitude and ran into the back. AN HOUR LATER the dress was steamed and ready for us to take home. Do you want to sit on a pin-riddled floor for an hour, getting dirty looks, 24 hours before you wedding? Yeah, I didn’t think so. To boot, the veil was left UNsteamed.

So you see, the most expensive outfit you are every going to wear is way too important to receive the service that we did. The salons often look down on brides who spend less than a few grand on a dress. It is wonderful if a bride can afford dresses of that price, however, for the majority of us, $1000 on a piece of clothing is astronomical, one of a kind, precious, what have you, and the experience should be pleasant. You should have to extract that bitch’s nose from your ass with the jaws of life. You should NOT have to sit on the floor for an hour the day before your wedding.

My advice to you all is, you better shop around.

Have you had any less-than-stellar bridal shop experiences?