My Dream Dress, Part II: The Rejects

So after the heartbreak of finding my ridiculously expensive dream dress, I decided to wait a few months to actually get engaged before trying on any dresses for real. Logical, right? I think it was mostly my attempt to not deal with the obvious "situation" at hand.

Six months or so passed by with the Stephen Yearick still hanging in my dorm room before I could gather the strength to go look at other dresses. My MOH and I headed out to find a gorgeous (and less expensive!) substitute. These are the rejects:


This dress was beautiful. The detailing was exquisite and the fabric felt luxurious - for less than $1000! Trouble is, it made my already-wide hips look GARGANTUAN to me. I began to realize that your typical mermaid-style dress had a habit of doing this. Much as I wanted something form-fitting, I was not interested in accentuating my hips to that extent!


This dress was very pretty and made me look more slender, in my opinion (although less curvaceous-sexy!). The drama wasn't there, though. It was too plain for my taste and just didn't say WOWZA to me. I think that's my nervous, "OMG I'm trying on wedding dresses face." That's my only excuse.


Crazy tulle dress! I didn't like this one at all on me. What you can see from this shot is that the tulle has a faint polka dot pattern, which is awesome, but I still wasn't a fan. That smile is fake.

I took various bridesmaids along with me to several stores (although I never hit the famed Kleinfeld, for fear that I would fall in love with something even MORE expensive) and only found one dress that was even a contender at all. It was a mermaid with quite a full skirt at the bottom, but was only several hundred dollars less than my original dream dress, so it wasn't really helping my cause. I unfortunately don't have a picture of that one because the salon didn't allow photos, but it was very pretty, although still more romantic and less dramatic.


I even got to the point where I was trying on other silhouettes to see if they might suit me better. While I thought this dress was really beautiful, I felt swallowed by it. The only part of me that really needed to actually BE in that dress was my shoulders.

I was starting to wonder if I would ever get that fluttery "this is the dress" feeling after all. I mean, maybe that's just exaggeration on the part of many a bride-to-be, I thought.

Did you get that "this is my dress!" feeling?

Previous Parts in this story:

Guilty, As Charged