Doesn’t the final try on mean the dress should be done?
Mom and I went to the alterations shop for the final fitting for the dress today. She and I were both under the impression that the dress would be done seeing as it was the last fitting before the wedding. Evidently “final” had a different meaning to the alterations lady. The hem was still not finished. The bustle was connected with a safety pin. The alterations lady did not finish the bustle because she wanted to show us an alternative bustle to the one we had chosen. We did agree that the new bustle looked better. It also needed 4 more hooks. Shockingly, those 4 extra hooks cost more money.
Mom and I will have to do a thorough inspection of the dress when we pick it up on Friday to make sure that “done” really means “done”.
wedding dress | Comment (0)Delivery from China
“We got a delivery from China today.”
This came as an instant message from my fiance to me at work. I was impressed. The dress was right on time!
“I am not sure if it is your dress.”
Um…. what else could it be? I asked the obvious question. “why?”
“Well, it is small. Not what I expected.” I couldn’t wait to see what he was talking about.
When I got home I saw a yellow DHL plastic bag about 10″ by 12″. You’ve got to be kidding me. There was NO way that there was a wedding dress in there. The package wasn’t even poofy. It was quite flat, actually.
But when I opened it, it WAS a wedding dress. I took it out of its packaging and laid it out on the bed. I kept the plastic bag to show Mom when she came over. She couldn’t believe that the dress had come out of the small bag. She helped me try it on and it fit perfectly! It needed to be hemmed and bustled, but that was it! The dress was done!
Now to find comfortable shoes!
wedding dress | Comment (0)Wedding Dresses on ebay?! what will they think of next?
Plagued with bridal dress fatigue, my best friend and I drug ourselves into the final bridal shop on our list. I had tried on no fewer than 40-50 dresses in 2 days. We had figured out what style fit, so every dress I tried on was pretty because it was the right cut. As the sales lady informed me “we are not trying to find a pretty dress, there are lots of those, we are trying to find the ‘perfect’ dress”. Yeah whatever. At this point, I just wanted A dress so that I wouldn’t have to try any more on.
THINGS I LEARNED: Don’t make any decisions immediately after you have tried on lots of dresses. It is like going to the grocery store when you are hungry. You will not have a clear enough head to make a sensible decision. You need to rest. Take a few days of not looking at dresses. Clear your head. Otherwise, you may end up with WAY more dress than you want.
I am not sure if it was due to our glassy-eyed bridal dress fatigue or the fact that we really just wanted out of there, but we actually found “the perfect dress”. As a matter of fact, we found two. The sales lady was kind enough to give us the designer names (no model number though) and sent us out the door, reminding me that I needed to make a decision pretty quickly because it was February and we needed at least 6 months to order a gown. No pressure or anything.
So I went home and started to surf the net. I went to the designer’s websites to see if I could find the dresses. I did not trust that the sales lady had necessarily given me the correct designer name, so I wanted proof. After much searching, I found both of the dresses on the respective designer’s sites. Now I had the model numbers! I went to an online dress website with a shop in Louisiana, and got prices for the two dresses I was interested in. The prices came in around 30% lower than the bridal shop’s prices. I was making progress!
For the next few days, I searched through page after page of dresses on ebay. I read the message boards on the Bridal Bargains Book website regarding dresses from China. Lots of women had written about the various ebay shops. I knew which shops sent good dresses on time and which ones had faulty cheap zippers. (Note: I just went on the website to see if I could find the message boards and I could not. So either they took them down, or their site is just that poorly designed). In the message boards and in the book they give seller IDs of ebay stores that people had had good luck with. One of these was called Cinderella Bridal, at least that is what it was called when I found my dress. The book did warn you that the shops changed names frequently. A little concerning, I know.
So, I went to the online shop and looked at the dresses. I started to recognize some of the names of the dresses as one of my designer’s dress names. It was a shop that knocked off one of my designers! I was ecstatic! I typed in my model name (the designer used women’s names) and there was the dress for around 80% less than in the store! I placed my order immediately. The site said it would take 35 days to get the dress plus 10 more because it was their busy season. 45 days was way more reasonable than the 6 months that the bridal store told me that I needed. Plus I figured, if the dress didn’t show up or showed up wrong, I wasn’t out that much. I had the dress done!
a truly wonderful experience?
By far, I think the worst experience I had was at Trudy’s Brides whose tag line on their website is “a Truly Wonderful Experience Awaits You”. I guess if you are in to the ostentatious and pretentious then perhaps Trudy’s would be a wonderful experience. Now to be fair, I was very suspect of the very “Wonderful Experience” that Trudy’s touts. I went in prepared for the most cunning of sales ladies trying to extract the most money out of me as quickly as possible. I am sure the naive gaggle of tittering 20-somethings in the dress veiwing area next to me were quite happy basking in the obsequious attention being showered on them by the “bridal consultant”, at least for the 90 minutes they were allotted, before they were unceremoniously cut off and shoved out the door. Trudy’s is the bridal shop that the books warn you about.
I went to the dressing room, where the consultant asked me what I was looking for before she went to find the perfect dress. Of course, all of the “perfect dresses” were again in the high end or TOTALLY out of the range that I had given her. They also did not necessarily reflect what I had told her I was interested in. In my cynicism, I believe they were more what she was interested in selling me, rather than what I wanted. All of the tags were Trudy’s tags not the designer’s tags, standard practice I assure you. If I asked the sales lady who the designer was, she would tell me, but she certainly did not volunteer that information, nor would she write it down for me. And when my best friend attempted to talk to the consultant as she was coming out of my dressing room, to suggest a certain dress that she saw, the consultant curtly informed her that she should just “go sit down” in the viewing area and brushed by her. Now I understand that the bride is the main target and the one with the money, but perhaps sales clerks should try to understand the basics of protocol amongst women. Best friends may be even more influential in this decision than mothers. Win the best friend and you have won the business. You would think that seeing as the sales clerk was a woman and I only had ONE friend with me, that she would understand this dynamic. Obviously NOT.
We left Trudy’s completely disgusted, never to return.
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bridal dress bonanza
If you are going to order a dress online, you first need to figure out what kind of dress fits your shape. The only way you can do this is to try on tons of dresses. My best friend came with me for bridal gown bonanza weekend. She booked us appointments for two days solid. We went to high end stores and down to off the rack sample stores (another good place to get a dress). The first place we went was having a trunk sale. This is where the store shows every dress in a designer’s collection and you can try on as many as you can fit into your appointment, which is usually around 4-5 dresses. The upside is that you get to see a lot of dresses hanging freely as opposed to smashed on racks with other dresses. The downside is that you generally ONLY get to see those dresses. We couldn’t really see other designers because it was a trunk show. So I tried on a few dresses and the high quality of the material was very evident. At over $3,000, it should be! This was my first round of the obligatory wedding related questions followed up by either wedding stories or tales of the sales ladies own dating life.
How did you meet your fiance? Where is your wedding? and the seemingly innocent:
“When is your wedding?”
This is a tricky question, because you might not want to give the real date. If the wedding date is within 6 months of when you are shopping, they sales lady will put on the very concerned face and tell you that you really need to order soon because it takes that long to get a dress. Then you start to get the harder sell. YUCK!
“What is your budget?” Ew. Another trick question. Obviously you need to HAVE a budget, but you do not need to disclose it. If anything give a range. You will quickly notice that the sales lady will find the top of that range and a little over the top of the range. This is how they make you buy more dress than you want. So my advice, is to give a range lower than what you really have budgeted. That way when the sales lady finds the “perfect dress” but apologetically she tells you it is a little out of your price range…Surprise! It still IS in your price range.
Next stop was a sample store. This is where all of the dress samples that lived in other bridal shops for a while went to be sold. This is also a good place to get dresses at discount prices. Same round of obligatory questions asked by the sales ladies, but at least the saleslady had a whisper of genuineness about her. Which leads me to the next shop….
my amortized six hour dress
I learned from my Bridal Bargains book that one of the biggest places to get ripped off was the “bridal dress shop”. Labels torn out of dresses so that you couldn’t tell the designer (they wouldn’t want you to shop the dress), salesclerks, excuse me, “bridal fashion consultants” trying to up-sell the hell out of all of the extras, or as they call them “necessities”. I had read the chapter on bridal gowns numerous times. According to the book, all dresses came from China, whether they were designer dresses or not. The dress left China for around $100-$200 and was sold to the designer. The designer sold the dress to the bridal shop for $500. The Bridal Shop sold the dress to the blushing bride for $1000. Quite a hefty mark up, if you ask me. However, China, true to form, is busy knocking off all of the dresses they are being paid to manufacture and you can buy them on ebay. Now, this is not for the faint of heart. You don’t know who you are dealing with, you can’t touch the fabric to know that is not 70’s polyester blend and who knows if the dress is made with lead beading or the fabric is washed in some sort of toxic chemical. But hey, if you are willing to risk it, you can get a wedding dress for bargain prices. I was willing to risk it. I was willing to risk it because it is a SIX HOUR DRESS. This was my answer whenever anyone asked why I would order a dress as special as a wedding dress on ebay. SIX HOURS! Figure most average dresses cost between $800-$1,200 per dress, before alterations. Tack on another $300-$500 for alterations and you have a dress that is going to run you between $1,100 and $1,700. Divide that by the 6 hours that you will be wearing a dress that costs $183-$283 per hour. There aren’t too many things that I will rent for that much per hour. And realistically, you are only going to wear the dress once, so why spend a fortune on it. I knew could definitely save money here!
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