the wedding dress story

Wedding dress, wedding dress, yay!

As much as I am, in many ways, completely totally not the wedding dress kind of girl (and I do genuinely believe that type of girl exists), I am also a big BIG fan of dress up. I always tell the story about how my Mom got rid of our dress up clothes when I was 14 and I was LIVID. "Mom! Mom! Where are our dress up dresses?!" "Your sisters don't play dressup any more, and you are FOURTEEN YEARS OLD." And so I joined the drama club to feed my addiction.

So as far as I'm concerned, the wedding dress is my last chance to play dressup, and this time I have a budget! So I introduced the bridal party to one another and we hiked on over to David's Bridal because it's convenient. And as it turns out, my tiny-topped bottom-heavy figure lends itself quite nicely to the wedding fashions of the day. And we found this lovely dress that was "very me." A bit of research reveals that it is a recommended dress for heavier girls, which means that on me I look like some kind of super model that I will never ever be in real life.

And here's a shot of it on a real live human being, which shows the detail a lot better.

Just lovely! But then I was like "Heyyyy . . . what about all that personality I ooze?" And then I remembered this one (I already discussed this tie-on number here).

Middle sister was enthusiastic. Matron O'Honor either overestimates the virtues of my figure or simply shares my vision, and immediately volunteered to help me recreate it. Little sister had no comment, and I have some snarky suspicions as to why, but I won't bring on the drama here. Mom was skeptical.

Okay, okay, oh hey! What about this:

What about it? It's a custom design that sells on Etsy for $6500, that's what about it. This is officially 20x my dress budget. Mom appreciated the modesty of the thing, and insisted I could find a knock off. I don't think she realizes it's not like, distributed, and it's also not in style, and therefore there is no knockoff. I google image searched for 200 pages and found nothing anywhere near it. I wrote to the designer asking if perhaps maybe she'd share her pattern (for a fee, naturally) and her compromise was to sell me the top part for $3500. While we're now only 10x my dress budget, it's still a very sad no go.

And even though it's still out of my budget, and I was very insistent on avoiding vintage (I have some philosophical bullshit around this thinking that I'll spare you), my search on Etsy for a dressmaker found this.

So the short story here is that I keep battling between finding some dramatic gem like one of these except both affordable AND practical, and saying "fuck it" because I wear the prolific strapless A-line beautifully, and I can't imagine I can't find a good deal on one of those, and who cares if it isn't one-of-a-kind . . . I'm going to be the only bride at my wedding anyway.

And then the third option that keeps creeping into my head is "you totally have the time and money to make your own dress," even though I worry that will be completely impractical and I'm not a great seamstress, and homemade is never cheaper even though it'll never fit as well, and what if I don't get it done in time and have to shell out the money for a dress IN ADDITION TO the cost of trying to make one?

Life is tough these days for the overgrown dressup enthusiast.