Wedding Gowns & Bridal Fashion

I’m not in love with Chloe.

At every store I visited in my hunt for a bridal gown, they told me I should fall in love with my dress. That I would know that this is my dress, THE dress. A few months ago, I bought a dress, in a style named Chloe, at a small store in New York, but I wasn’t in love.

To be sure, I got a beautiful dress. I’ll be excited to walk down the aisle wearing it. I should be; I paid more for this dress than I have ever paid for an article of clothing before — or ever plan to spend again. But love?

I had never shopped for a wedding dress before, and maybe because of that I didn’t expect buying a dress to be much different from buying any other piece of clothing.

Wrong.

For starters, at least where I shopped in New York and northern New Jersey, you can’t go into a bridal store without making an appointment. I tried once and was promptly hustled out with a business card and instructions to call before returning.

Then, instead of browsing through racks, I stood half-dressed in a fitting room while a saleswoman brought in dresses she thought I might like, based on a couple of questions about style and price range. She would pull the dresses over my head, button them up and pin the excess fabric back, pulling tight the way I imagine Victorian maids tugged on their mistresses to tighten a corset. Sometimes, she would put a veil on my head, too, carefully smoothing it over my hair. Then she stood back and asked, “What do you think?”

Here is where I was supposed to swoon.

I went to big stores and small stores, expensive ones and cheap ones. At all of them, the saleswomen told me I was supposed to fall in love with my dress and feel “something” when I first put it on. I was supposed to feel beautiful. Radiant. In love. Like a princess.

At some stores, including the one I ended up purchasing from, the dresses had names, meant to express their personalities. A friend of mine got Rose, who had a tinge of pink shine in her fabric. At these places, the dress is not an “it”; the dress is a “she.” Apparently, it’s easier to fall in love with her than it.

Friends asked me about shopping, too. “Did you cry?” “Was it amazing?” “Did you feel like a bride?”

I didn’t cry. I don’t know how a bride is supposed to feel. In fact, I didn’t feel anything except frustrated and inadequate, like I was missing something.

Maybe I just hadn’t looked hard enough yet.

My initial shopping excitement turned to drudgery as I marched through store after store, dragging along my mother, sister, friends and even a groomsman, just waiting for that special feeling. Waiting for love at first sight. Everyone told me it would happen. All I had to do was find the right dress.

Again and again, I waited to gaze into the mirror, feeling it. Every time, I left disappointed. Each time, I would go into a store thinking my dress, THE dress, might be here. It had to be somewhere. All I had to do was keep looking for that right dress, that right damn dress.

Finally, I realized that, no matter how much I loved it, my wedding dress was not my groom, not why I was getting married, not who I would promise to love “till death do us part.”

Yet saleswomen had convinced me that it was so. They talked about buying a dress as if it were like falling in love with a person. The language they used equated the wedding dress with the wedding and all that it means. Of course, even in love, we don’t always feel it the minute we try it on. Still, I was just spending an afternoon with this dress, not a lifetime.

That made it easy. I went back to the small boutique where I had tried on Chloe, which I really liked. It (she?) is strapless with a satin empire waist and an ivory-colored silk body. The decision to buy it was not practical, but it was the dress I liked best, even if I wasn’t in love.

Source: NorthJersey.com