Weddingbee Blog

Let me start by mentioning that I was not the girl who had her whole wedding planned by age seven. Nope. In fact, aside from the occassional “sigh I really need to marry Leonardo DiCaprio” (ah, to be a tween again), marriage didn’t really cross my mind in passing until I was in high school, and I didn’t think about it seriously until college. But, even then, I was too busy with other things that seemed more important. Like my thesis, and beach volleyball, and finding a job after graduation. Marriage could wait; I was in no hurry. So, when I got engaged, I didn’t have a massive binder full of wedding scenarios, budgets, and inspiration that I had compiled over the years.

I will admit, though, that I started subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings about two years before we got engaged. Why? Who knows? I definitely didn’t expect a proposal! I think it stemmed more from the fact that I just love looking at the pretty, pretty pictures. And we all know my obsession with florals. Every once in a while, I would rip pages out of the magazines—checklists, etiquette, wording for invitations, bouquets—that caught my eye, and I would file them away for later. And by “file them away for later,” I mean I would stick them on a bookshelf where they would gather dust and, after they got too dusty and old, I would toss them. Oopsie. But mainly I would browse through the magazines, and then they’d go out with the recycling.

In all my time spent leafing through the lovely mags, one thing that I didn’t really look at or care about was the dresses. As in, the dress. For some reason, I just never really cared about wedding dresses. Don’t hate me. OK, actually, that’s a lie—I did enjoy looking at the pictures of gorgeous dresses in the magazines. But, I never really looked at them purposefully, with the thought of “what do I want my wedding dress to look like.” I mainly flipped past the dress ads; they just weren’t high on my list of interests! I would much prefer looking at beautiful flowers, and fun signature drinks, and funky, fresh stationery than figuring out what type of fabric I wanted to drape myself in on the big day.

Photograph via Library of Congress

In retrospect, this may have been a combination of a few things:

1. I’m not much of a shopper. Shocking, right? Seriously, I hate trying on clothes because I have massively broad shoulders, so I hate how a lot of clothes look on me. This is why I love shopping online. Therefore, I think I may have ignored the fact that I had to figure out how to clothe myself for our wedding in a way that would not make me look like an ox.

2. Even though I had those gorgeous, spanking-new magazines, the main thing I had to go off of (in my mind) in terms of what a wedding dress looks like was old pictures of grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts. I mean, I know the styles are actually coming back full-circle now and some of those older dresses are coming back into style, but I didn’t really want to walk down the aisle in a big, shiny, puffy-sleeved dress in which you could hide a small village.

Photograph via Library of Congress

Those dresses scare me a little. Consequently, I ignored the whole dress aspect of the wedding and concentrated more on decor, colors, etc. Wedding dress? Pshhh. Who thinks about THAT?!

Did anyone else ignore/avoid the whole wedding-dress part of planning?