Undaunted, the lovely Kleinfelds bridal consultant, who was twice my age and half my size, said, in the heaviest of NY accents "listen tah me. Youuu awh goingk tah bee a beeeuuteeful broide"
No bridal challenge comes close to the wedding dress selection. All the more so when you aren't close to the targeted market sector.
My dress shopping consisted of several hours of internet research and one visit to Kleinfeld's. http://www.kleinfeldbridal.com/
For those of you unfamiliar with the store, Kleinfeld's is the Home Depot of wedding gowns. As a non-traditional bride, I selected Kleinfeld's for its sheer variety. As some sort of punishment to both of us, I brought my mother along.My mother has always been the cool mom my friends liked because she treated us like adults when we were kids. She never baked cookies or kissed a boo-boo and she never fantasized about the day she would go wedding dress shopping with her daughter. Most days, we get along just fine but some days, I want that Betty Crocker mom to materialize and if she won't do it willingly, I'll drag it out of her (do therapists read these sites trolling for patients?)
So my mother and I set out for NYC one Saturday last fall. En route, I looked lovingly through the stack of photos of the princess style dresses I had selected while she said things like "remember, you are almost 50."
As soon as we arrived, I realized we looked like the mother and grandmother of the bride as we sat in the waiting area with the child brides. To make matters worse, they were filming "Say Yes to the Dress" (a reality show featuring brides shopping for their gowns). Signs caution you that by walking through the showroom, you are likely to be captured on film. My mother who HATES attention did a version of the marine crawl through the showroom to get to our dressing room off camera.
While our consultant was hard at work, my mother and I browsed
the Michelle Roth Trunk Sale and both zeroed in on the same beautiful dress. It was sophisticated, simple and ivory. It wasn't princess gown and it wasn't an ivory suit. It was a beautiful dress for a first time bride.The consultant came back with an armful of options but we said "this is it!" I don't think she expected to make a sale in under 15 minutes but that was about all the dress stress I could handle and my mother's fake smile and efforts to be supportive were beginning to wear on me. The consultant draped the dress in front of me (I'm not sample size) and bless her tiny little heart, she pulled the waist around my waist (think of the corseting scene from Gone With The Wind) and actually created a waist for me - first time I ever saw that. I thought of hiring her to walk behind me for special occasions.
By my informal count, 98% of today's gowns come sleeveless. That is a problem. With the notable exceptions of Michelle Obama and Madonna, how many of us should really be showing our arms at this age?
I'm a big fan of the shawl but I didn't want to wrestle with it all night (and did I mention I like to dance) so Michelle Roth worked with the nice people at Kleinfelds. She added straps to the dress and the Kleinfeld's seamstress designed a cool organza shawl that wrapped around my arms and connected behind me with an elastic so it stayed in place and let me dance to my heart's content.Then there was the length question. I assumed that being a bride of a certain age, I should hem the dress to cocktail length. My consultant said "length slims" so I decided to keep every last inch of it.
The gown came with a chapel length train and everyone at Kleinfled's agreed it should stay. My mother smiled and nodded, waited them to leave, and whispered "you're almost 50."
The train stayed :)
Hey POLB--I gotta tell you that at first I didn't think the shawl/wrap do-dad would work, but in the end I think it worked perfectly. If you'd had a jacket, I think it would have made you look broader across the shoulders because it would have been solid from side to side, but the shawl-y thing broke up what would have otherwise been a lot of white and created "visual appeal" while covering the bane of every woman's existence...the flabby upper arms. Of course, I'm currently wearing a pair of shorts with a button missing and a torn t-shirt, so take my fashion advice for what it's worth.
ReplyDelete