The Wedding Dress: The Puffier the Better?

I have a house that is still under construction, but don’t have any furniture picked yet, I don’t have a wedding date or location but know, almost, where my honeymoon will be and I just added a new item into my marriage box: My wedding dress!

As per traditions, or even logic, the wedding dress is usually the last thing that a bride gets to pick as people usually choose the clothes they are going to wear after finding out when and where they are actually going.

Well, it wasn’t the case for me; yes I don’t have a date or location yet, but my parents decided to fly me to France to pick out my wedding dress. How glamorous, just like the movies — flying to Paris for your wedding dress is too Paris Hilton for me.

But sarcasm aside, it was a coincidental business and family trip that turned out to be my wedding dress trip, and I do feel very grateful, despite my constant jokes about it.

Unlike the movies, dress fittings and finding the perfect wedding dress have nothing to do with the cliché scenes in romantic comedies where a bunch of friends are having fun sipping champagne and trying out fabulous gowns. It is actually very time-consuming and needs thinking and planning ahead — and the patience to get dressed and undressed ten times a day.

But don’t go fixing all the appointments you can get; if you think that the more shops you go to, the better options you have, you are wrong.

Don’t waste your effort going into too many boutiques you will never make up your mind, and you will hate every dress you try on at the end of the hectic day — it is just a dress after all. 

Finding the perfect wedding dress is surprisingly tiring, involving two hours of standing up, putting a wedding dress on and then taking it off every ten minutes.  It is also not the most comfortable experience when a stranger is dressing and undressing you after a heavy Parisian lunch that makes you feel like napping.

What is also not too much fun is how unexpected the fittings turn out to be.  I have to say that all these catalogs with their romantic settings and supermodels posing in wedding dresses are very misleading. When I tried on the “Carmen” flowy dress I had always wanted, instead of looking like the bohemian, mysterious bride in the catalog, I looked like a giant bird.

My search for the perfect wedding dress also turned into a battle between my parents and I on getting me to try out the puffiest dress in the store. If I had listened to their choices I would have tried on dresses that made me look like Cinderella, Scarlett O’Hara and Lady Diana all combined into one giant puff.  What is the obsession with puffs and long trains anyway? I am not a princess and will not suddenly become one on my wedding day.

Don’t worry too much about how perfectly it fits when you try it on because you will definitely have to have alterations made until the very last weeks before the wedding.

My final tip: Just don’t beat yourself up putting too much effort into picking your dress. Yes, it is, after all, your wedding dress, but it is also just a dress. Just go with your gut feeling and have fun looking pretty and finding something that suits you — which is exactly what I did when I picked my dress in ten minutes.

At the very last store I found the perfect combination of the anti-bride persona and the secretly excited romantic that resides in me. I was tired of trying out so many dresses that all looked the same but when I saw this I thought, “This is a nice dress and maybe it could be the ‘one’” — yes I was actually excited. I liked it, and I got it. Simple.