Getting The Dress... Part 1

So my dress and veil are bought. It was an interesting process, one that was neither as fun nor as emotionally draining as I thought it would be.

I ended up buying my dress in Edmonton because that’s the closest city to where my parents live and they were actually the ones who bought the dress (thanks!) so while this might be a blog about getting married in Toronto, it won’t actually contain any entries about me buying a wedding dress in Toronto.

But despite this geographical conflict, I’m going to share my dress shopping story anyway.

It started at a place called Pure Bridal in downtown Edmonton and initially, I was quite looking forward to dress shopping though I was a bit worried that the process might end in a screaming match with my mother (not only did this not happen but I don’t think my mother and I argued once during the entire dress shopping process).

Pure Bridal is one of Edmonton’s more upscale wedding dress shops, the kind of place with large, private dressing rooms where you have a dedicated clerk. My clerk could have been a bit more interested in who I was and what sort of wedding I was having. While I realize that hearing people’s wedding plans day-after-day might get a bit tedious, I still expect a least a hint of interest in my plans (perhaps I have just seen too many episodes of that TLC wedding dress show).

I also found it very odd that she didn’t ask me any questions about my venue or theme. All she asked about were my dress budget, my wedding colours and if I had any idea of what I wanted. I gave her some rambling answer to that last question and as a result, more than a couple no-go dresses were pulled.

The first dress that she pulled wasn’t bad. It wasn’t quite right but it did confirm what I wanted: something with a large tulle skirt and a touch of silver. I also wanted my dress to be classic but different and under $1500 (while I’m sure there’s a dress out there that meets all this requirements, I didn’t have the energy to hunt it down).

In the interest of being open-minded, I did try on dresses that didn’t meet my requirements but I kept coming back to that original idea of the big, silver and white tulle dress. Unfortunately, Pure Bridal doesn’t stock a lot of tulle dresses (while annoying, this fact also makes me happy because I’m choosing to believe it means that tulle dresses aren’t very popular and that’s fine with me). The closest one I could find had a ton of silver beading on the top and while it looked great on me, it didn’t feel quite right (and it was over-budget and there was no way we were going to go over-budget on a dress I didn’t love).

This turned out to be the situation with most of the dresses—they looked great on me but none of them felt quite right. By about dress six, I was feeling rather frustrated. You always hear stories about how the first dress the bride tried on turned out to be the perfect one or about how a bride falls in love with the image of a pricey dress and is then able to find the perfect knockoff of that dream dress. For me however, the search had to continue...