Bridezilla
Guy and I have been engaged for six weeks. In that time we’ve managed to book the wedding, reception, rings, favours, invites, not to mention sort out all the legal stuff that goes along with marrying a foreigner (me).
The average wedding supposedly costs somewhere in the vicinity of £22,000 and takes 18 months to plan, figures that are astonishing to me. We are getting married in a month and for somewhere around a tenth of that cost.
Weddings can get pretty crazy, I went to the National Wedding Show a month ago with Kat, Gemma and Gill and strangely enough on the day it became de rigueur to speak of dresses below £1,000 as being “reasonable”. I’ve come to the conclusion that once you mention the W word to a supplier they figure that you’ve lost all sense of perspective and they figure they can double, nay triple the price of whatever it is that they’re selling. When I read Vogue and hear them describing a £1,000 coat as a good investment, I use the highly logical cost per wear calculation which goes: price of item/number of wears = cost per wear. That way a £1,000 coat is not so expensive, because at two seasons of wear it comes out at a mere £2.7 per wear. However, a wedding dress that you pay £1,500 for but only wear once, is rather less cost effective.
I am not a big weddings kind of a girl and I always imagined that I would get married in a casual dress. However over the short planning period, the dress has been cause for most of my bridezilla moments. Sudenly those short breezy casual dresses have lost their lustre.
However, the traditional wedding dress really only has a few variants, there is straps vs no straps, different gradations of fluffy skirt and lace vs some kind of silky, shiny satiny thing. The rest tends just to be frosting. Otherwise, they all seem kind of samey.
In my six weeks of looking at wedding dresses, I have not had a single desperate, gotta have it and can’t live without it moment about any of them. There have been dresses that I’ve liked more than others, but I’ve not had that feeling. With the standard wedding dress taking somewhere in the vicinity of six to eight months to buy and alter (or so the wedding books tell me), this has become a particularly stressful situation.
The dress somehow metastized into a giant portent of disaster, a sign that a wedding could not be organised in just three months, that my perfect day, would somehow be imperfect. I needn’t have worried. As I’ve not been able to find something off the peg, some friends of friends have stepped in and I am very excited that I will be wearing a couture gown! Made to measure seems like such a rarified thing, but I’ll keep you up to date on the whole process.
