Dressing Up (Part 1)

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I have known for years that I wanted to wear something vintage or vintage-inspired at my wedding. It's not that I hate modern wedding gowns. On the contrary, I LOVE them on other people. I watch "Say Yes To The Dress" religiously, and have since Season 1. Okay, I watch for the horror as much as the ecstasy, but I still think a majority of the gowns look beautiful on the brides. And I honestly thought that every one of my friends looked positively divine wearing a full-length modern gown on her wedding day. Those dresses, however, are just so not me. I don't know what it is that makes me so averse to even trying one on. There's just something fussy and heavy about them. Heavy with fabric, heavy with cake-topper-Bride-with-a-capital-B symbolism, heavy with ... a feeling of requirement? "This is what you have to wear because this is what people wear." But I still want to look bridal ... just in my own way.

I have always loved vintage clothes and vintage styles and since our wedding is in Las Vegas at the end of summer, when temperatures could be in the 90s, I wanted something short, which almost no newer gowns are. There are a few very cute styles, but none of them really called to me.

My first thought was to have a vintage dress recreated by a talented seamstress (I sew, but not that well). Many years ago as I was trolling the internet for vintage clothes to buy, I found the most amazingly adorable vintage dress. It was a knee-length off-white (like halfway between dove gray and white, but kind of silvery as opposed to dirty-looking) satin dress with a full skirt and adorable beading. The dress was already sold (first problem) and had cost like $800, which was way, way more than I would have spent for a dress at that point in my life, when a wedding was something I wasn't sure I'd ever have. However, there were several very crisp, well-lit images of the dress from every angle. I copied the pics onto my hard drive and never forgot the dress over the years. In the back of my mind I thought that if I ever got married, maybe I'd be able to commission someone to make the dress for me, based on the pictures.

Well, in the intervening years, a booming market of Chinese dressmakers started doing business on ebay and now it's possible to get anything you want made by them, and on the cheap. I sent my pictures to one of the ebayers, they said they could do it, I asked for fabric swatches, they obliged. And that's when the bloom came off the rose a bit. None of the swatches were quite the same as the magical shade of the original dress and they were all awful-feeling acetate, polyester, I don't-know-what, not the silk satin I had inquired about and which I believed the original dress to be. I could have pursued it further, and I still might, but once a little bit of doubt creeped in, the whole plan started to seem less appealing.

Which led me to ... Part Two of this saga! Stay tuned.