Weddingbee Blog

Now that I’ve established how sucky I apparently am at wedding dress shopping, we can move on. Even though my first experience was a bummer, I had a backup plan, a glimmer of hope. There was a dress that stuck out in my mind and had since 2008, when I was MOH-ing for my best friend. I was looking online, and somehow: there it was.

Short, sheer sleeves that would make me feel covered, but not matronly. A fitted silhouette that would suit my curves without being restrictively form-fitting. A floaty, rippling train unlike any I had ever seen. More beading that I would have imagined, but somehow—I knew it would work.

It was everything I wanted, not only in a wedding dress but in the feel of the wedding. It was romantic, it was a little old-fashioned, it was formal but not regal. It was perfect.

And it was designed exclusively for Kleinfeld.

Fine.

The week after I got engaged (January 2010), I booked a flight to New York to visit my best man and try on the dress in June. By February, two of my bridesmaids planned mini-vacations that same weekend so we could all go together.

On the fateful day of Saturday, March 13th, 2010, I went to Kleinfeld online to ogle My Dress. (Oh please, you do it too.) Only this time it read, in big red letters: This Dress No Longer Available.

I stayed calm—all-business. My best man, bless him, immediately offered to go down there and speak with the Kleinfeld staff in person, to see if there was any possible course of action. I considered this, while Google-searching the crap out of anything related to this dress.

Now, I am mostly interested in marrying Mr. PD on my wedding day. I’m not, ahem, married to most of the details that the day might include. I like to think I have a healthy perspective about the whole shindig, and I don’t need every little thing to be Absolutely Perfect. But the dress thing…well, that was different because:

1. It was the one thing I had a strong feeling about from the beginning (other than my affianced)
2. It is really, REALLY hard to find a dress with sleeves period, let alone one that I think might suit me.

I stalked every single ’preowned’ wedding dress site I could find. Nada. But then, a tiny firefly of hope. As it turns out, although the collection was exclusively designed for Kleinfeld, they had entered into a handful of partnerships with smaller boutiques that are very far away from Manhattan. The nearest to me? Nashville.

I bet you’re thinking…next stop: Nashville. But you’re wrong. Next stop: grocery store, where I planned to lay my sorrows on the altar of Ben and Jerry. I planned to eat an entire pint of Marsha, Marsha, Marshmallow because the only dress I had cared about squeezing into was slipping through my fingers.

And…you guessed it. Marsha, Marsha, Marshmallow? No Longer Available.

Stay tuned for what happens next, in terms of ice cream and the dress. Do I settle for a second-choice or do I hunt down that discontinued confection that I wanted so desperately?

(P.S. Ben and Jerry, do you read wedding blogs? Bring back my ice cream!)