Weddingbee Blog

I’m one of those brides who could honestly care less about the dresses that my bridesmaids wear. In fact, I told them that we could pick a designer and color and length, and they could choose from there. Whatever made them feel beautiful. My bridesmaids are all different sizes and shapes. MOH A is a size four and is 5′3″. BM S is a size sixteen and is 5′6″. BM E is 5′2″ and is a size eight. No two girls are alike in any way. Thus the reasoning behind getting different dresses. MOH A and I talked about the reason we had to pick one designer and color. Navy is one of those weird colors that all designers seem to do in varying shades. Some navy blues are so dark they are black, and others are light and look almost like a dark royal blue. Not that I minded the shades, but for some kind of cohesiveness MOH A urged me to go with one designer, thus one shade of blue.

Now MOH A pretty much took charge on the dress front, which is fine with me. About half of my bridesmaids live in Des Moines, where MOH A lives, so if she wanted to book the appointments to find the dresses, I was game. I was happy to delegate (which is completely surprising because I am usually one of those people who likes to control every little detail). So MOH A made an appointment at a swanky bridal salon in Des Moines because there was one dress that I really loved the idea of and wanted the girls to try on.

The Convertible Wrap Dress from Dessy. The top can change into anything the wearer wants! / Image via Dessy

The dress was a bust. Not only could you only order it online, the only way to try it on was to also rent a try-on from the Dessy site for 35 bucks. Um, sorry, but I was not going to spend money to have my girls try on a dress that may or may not work.

The bridal salon was also a bust. They wouldn’t let the girls take pictures to send to me, plus they were super snotty. So MOH A and BM S left to see if David’s Bridal could fit them in. They figured this was a good second choice since the rest of the BMs were spread out (some in other states), and they could go in and order their dresses on their own. So they went and were sure to take a ton of pictures for me. MOH A was actually hoping to find a dress that all of the girls could wear; she is more traditional in that aspect. I told her if she could find one that all of the girls could agree on then, sure, that would work too. So she and BM S began to try them on.

Some were obvious nos:

These dresses were not that flattering on the curvier girls…so they were nos.

None of the girls were feeling the bows or the bubble hem.

Some were definite maybes:

We thought the above dresses were fun and flirty.

The girls liked the sparkle on the hem of these dresses.

And then they tried these on:

The holy grail of BM dresses (at least for our party)

Every single one of my BMs who went to try on this dress loved the way it fit. MOH A had done what I thought would be impossible. She found a dress that flattered every single girl and that every girl wanted to wear. We are getting them in the blue color. As an added bonus there was this:

MOH A joked that she could hide a mini-flask in there for me in case the jitters get to be too much. What is the funniest part of this whole thing is that, while the dress was surprisingly easy to find, the shoes have now become the hard part to find. Finally, I told the girls that we will just go shoe shopping as part of my bachelorette weekend, and it’s not a huge deal if the shoes don’t match. Their reasoning is that if the dress matches, the shoes need to match!

Was it easy for you to find your wedding-party dresses? And was your wedding party pickier about what they wore than you were?

*All are personal photos unless otherwise specified!