Unattainable ideal: How I chose a wedding dress
If you believe American romcoms, since childhood, every girl has been carrying out a wedding album, where she estimates how her bouquet will look like, what bridesmaids dresses will be and what cake will be served in the finale of the evening. Everything was wrong with me: the only thing I thought about when I presented my hypothetical wedding was before the boyfriend proposed to me - the song for the first dance (of course, we chose a completely different one) and the dress.
The dream of a dress in the style of the 20s was broken after trying on the first straight dress in sequins - in it I felt not miniature, but square
Weddings and wedding culture are a longtime subject of controversy: is it worth investing so much money in it? Isn't it better to spend it on a trip, mortgage, repair or car? Who needs weddings at all - is it not easier to sign "quietly" and not to roll up a large-scale banquet? A wedding dress is one of the main points in such discussions: why spend a whole salary on a thing that you will wear only one day? And although more and more girls prefer to marry in dresses that can be put on after a significant date (albeit evening), I still wanted the classic long white - simply because the opportunity to walk in such and not feel stupid and inappropriate falls out in life. Well, or as lucky.
On the search for a wedding dress they tell different things: one friend of mine found hers in the first salon for a modest 12,000 rubles, the other went to salons, where only three dresses could be measured for free, and for the rest she had to pay extra, the third said that her friend had found excellent outfit for reasonable money in the market "Gardener". My search was brought to a wide variety of salons (except, perhaps, Vera Wong's boutique): I visited (albeit rather for fun) in the salon, where the average bill for a dress is 150,000 rubles, the salon of the average price category, which I advertise in "VKontakte", fashion shop in the former factory and democratic salon, where, if desired, you can find a dress for 20 000 rubles.
By the beginning of the search, I decided what dress I want: a long, cream-colored, in the spirit of the twenties - the same can be found in the ASOS wedding lineup. True, she ultimately refused to buy a dress at an online store: when you are 160 centimeters tall, you have voluminous hips and even the search for ordinary jeans turns into an adventure, you don’t want to risk it once again - it’s not clear how you will be buying.
Although the excitement of searching for and buying a dress was hardly comparable with the stress of preparing for a wedding in general, I still had to be nervous. The girl who decided to look for a wedding dress, waiting for a few unpleasant surprises. Firstly, the way the dresses look in the lookbooks does not at all reflect how they will sit on an ordinary person: apart from the fact that the models are always thin and tall, each of them also stands on a special stand for the dress to flow beautifully at the feet. My dream of a dress in the style of the twenties broke after the first straight dress in sequins, which I measured in an expensive salon for the sake of interest - in it I felt not miniature, but square.
In the same expensive salon, another unpleasant surprise awaited me: in everyday life, I wear things of the size 42-44, but wedding dresses were often cramped for me. And although the store employees kindly assured that the dress can be slightly dissolved at the seams and I will feel comfortable in it, I always wondered how girls with large sizes of clothes look for dresses and why the wedding industry in Russia most often ignores them. And even if there are large-sized dresses in the salon, thin girls show them all the same - because of what the contact with reality is lost completely, and it’s absolutely impossible to understand how a particular dress will look in life.
Secondly, it is impossible to understand the quality of a thing from photographs - no matter how long you study the salon website, the reality will make its own adjustments anyway. The most unpleasant revelation for me was the democratic shop on Belorusskaya: simple minimalist dresses (stitched, as it turned out later, in Belarus) turned out to be made of a tablecloth from a school canteen, and even for the amount that a good dress could be sewn to order. For some reason it was impossible to photograph in the same salon - although those who decide to copy the design can easily find photos of dresses on the site.
Expectations about the quality of dresses were not justified not only there. One of the dresses, which I measured in the salon on the territory of the former factory, looked unusual and interesting and turned out to be almost an exact copy of Vera Wang's dress from the old collection - but of inferior quality, with poorly worked edges that threatened to crawl after dry-cleaning and steaming.
In wedding salons do not trust to put on a dress independently, so you quickly learn to undress in the presence of strangers
A wedding dress requires serious investments, and it is often wiser to sew it to order if you know exactly what you want and you have contact with a good dressmaker. It seems almost the only way to save money is to buy a dress in the mass market or, if you still want a “cake”, to rent it (but then it will be impossible to fit the outfit to your height). Another option is to buy a dress out of season, which begins in March: the same dresses, bought in October, and not in May or April, will cost a half to two times cheaper. This is especially offensive when in spring, leafing through the store page on the social network, in the album you see a dress just bought with an old price tag. And all this is not counting the additional expenses: at least fitting in length and in the shoulders and steaming.
The search for the model that suits you is a separate big question. Russian wedding fashion implies corsets (I don’t understand how you can feel comfortable on their wedding day, if you have never worn them before), push-up (they will surely offer you to sew additional inserts that visually enlarge breasts, even if you I did not think), fluffy petticoats, in which walking is obtained slowly and with great difficulty, and an abundance of lace. According to the results of the first fittings, I wanted a simple satin dress - it quickly became clear that there were only a couple of pieces in each salon.
Employees of the salon will do everything to sell you a dress - this seems to be an obvious thought, but the future bride is in a very vulnerable position. You will be told how perfectly the dress is sitting, offering to take a photo, they will beautifully spread out the train at the mirror, and then add a color belt and veil, so that you cannot help but present yourself as the heroine of the devil's romcom. You learn about the price of a particular dress only when you ask a direct question - so it’s best to clearly state your budget right away so you don’t get upset. Some things in the salon just prefer to be silent: since I tried on the dress a second time, having already decided to buy, I found out that dresses of this brand were delivered to the salon from abroad on a specific order and I would have to wait a couple of months. In wedding salons you do not trust to put on a dress on your own, so you quickly learn to undress in the presence of strangers: by the end of the fittings I quietly removed my bra in the presence of three seamstresses working in the salon.
Your own sense of time and deadlines does not at all coincide with the ideas of employees of the salon: for you it is an important date for which you need to prepare, if not half a year, then at least three months, for them - the next season. As soon as you call the wedding date, all the fittings and files are shifted close to her, so there’s just no opportunity to pick up the dress for two days, but two weeks before the wedding, unless, of course, you do not initially lie about the date. The dress that I liked, the salon had to order directly from the brand from abroad, from where it should have been delivered in six weeks. But in the end, the outfit that I bought at the end of April, I saw only in July, and could only take him home three days before the wedding.
At the last stage, it turns out a bunch of other small details: for some reason, you need to take the stripped dress not in the case, but in the duvet cover brought from the house so as not to stain the hem and train (why the dress does not fit in the case designed for it is a separate question) that the dress does not fit into the back seat of a taxi (and indeed it is not clear how it can be folded somewhere without wrinkling it), that in a dream dress you need not only to stand beautifully at a photo shoot, but also to sit and climb into a car and move all day and (oh, horror!) to go to the toilet - and absolutely eponyatno how to do it without help.
My fiance managed to buy a suit, shirt and shoes in an hour in the first store. I looked at a couple of hundred dresses on the Internet, went to four salons and a store (some of them twice), tried on a total of two dozen dresses and spent more than a month on it. I am sure that in the pursuit of the perfect dress you can go and not on this, but my strength was not enough for more.
It turned out that for some reason it is necessary to pick up a stripped dress not in a case, but in a duvet cover brought from a house so as not to stain the hem of the train
On the wedding day, no matter how carefully I watched the dress, the hem quickly got dirty anyway. It was raining (amazing luck!), And one of the brightest moments was how we walked past the yards past the construction site to the photo studio, and I tried to save the dress. Later, to go from point to point when we were photographed with the bridegroom in the botanical garden, the hem of the dress had to be collected and carried in hands - it was not easy, but as it turned out, it is much more difficult to get used to the weight of the dress when you just go, behind you stretches the train.
The most unexpected thing for me was that on the wedding day I dismissed the train on the dress only once, for ten minutes - even in the tilted version I had to watch that no one stepped on it. For some reason, the train should have been straightened out in a relaxed atmosphere - at the registration desk at the registry office or when we took pictures on the balcony with the guests - for some reason I only thought the next morning, after looking at the photos. I regret a little about the missed opportunity, but it seems that the main advantage of the dress is still not a hem, but an open back. Not without incident: in the midst of dinner, a friend stepped on my hem and tore off a button, with which the train could be pulled higher. I panicked, but my aunt almost immediately found a needle, thread, and a new (albeit less formal) button, and in ten minutes a friend brought it back to me - for which I am very grateful.
A long classic dress with a full skirt is definitely not the most convenient option for a wedding - so, if comfort is more important for you on this day, it is better to choose a dress that is shorter and less magnificent. But I am sure that it was worth it: the dress is absolutely consistent with my style and character, and looking at the photos, I feel that I have made the right choice.
What to do with the dress after the wedding, I have not decided yet. And although I like it terribly, I do not feel sentimental feelings and the desire to pass it on to my daughter: I think that I will either sell it or shorten it and will wear it myself. We'll see.
Photo: Alexander Karelin, author's personal archive
