Finding the perfect wedding dress is a little bit like imagining yourself as Cinderella. After all, you wear this dress for an evening and you get food and wine and sweat and grass stains all over your dream dress and then you go home some time after midnight, take it off and never put it on again. Finally you dry clean it and put it in your closet until maybe you have a daughter who rejects it because she wants her own dress that’s cooler and isn’t stained. Not to mention the fact that you’ve dieted and exercised until you can squeeze yourself into a size 6 when in your normal life you’re an 8, which in wedding dress numbers are really a 4 and a 6 because all wedding dresses run a size small. Talk about fairy tales!
But it’s the commerce of wedding dresses that kills me. Weddings are an $85 billion industry in the US alone and a huge part of it is the dresses. My mother bought her two-piece dress for $25 at Macy’s. My aunt spent about $60 on a traditional Mexican dress, which she wore with a gros-grain belt. Nowadays, to get a really nice dress, you often have to spend more than $1000. And you are rewarded with beautiful lines and materials that feel as light as fairies and hug your body like butter. But that’s far beyond most people’s hopes or even their dreams.
Last week a friend, who is also getting married this summer, and I went to David’s Bridal. In our arrogance we did it more as a joke, thinking it would be funny to try on cheap dresses at the place we’ve heard dubbed as the “K-Mart for Wedding Dresses.” We thought we’d look at the dresses more as information — like, do I look better in strapless or straps? Halters or cowl necks? And we did get that information in a sense, but it was hard to tell because the dresses were all made of such scratchy materials and the cuts were nowhere near as flattering as higher end dresses.
It was heartbreaking that in the case of a “girl’s most special day” that everyone can’t get something just a little nicer than polyester. There were girls there who looked about twenty, with their mothers, whose faces were leathered and reeked of cigarettes, and as my friend said, looked like “tough girls with tough roads ahead.” One stood on the platform in one of the simpler dresses and tied a bow around her middle in deep claret and proclaimed to her mother, “this is just perfect, it’s just what I want,” and then she plunked down what must have been a couple of weeks’, even months’, pay. And your heart had to break a little — not for her exactly, because she loved the dress, but for the arrogance that allowed my friend and me to think that this excursion was anything less than important.
A couple of days later I met my cousin in Boston where I tried on dresses at boutiques on Newbury Street. In a way the idea was the same — this would be fun but not very serious because I couldn’t afford any of these either. The prices were four, five, sometimes ten times what they would have cost at David’s, but the materials were gorgeous, the lines perfect, the shapes flattering. Insulated by money, not our money, but the possibility of money, our lives seemed like anything was possible. Whereas there was something about David’s that made life feel that much harder, dreams that much more unattainable.
I came away from both with no dress, feeling a little dirtied by commerce of weddings when really we should see our dresses as just this: a Cinderella moment after which we all go back to being pumpkins in the same field.
Email the author
Caitlin Shetterly: bramhallsquare@yahoo.com
