Now that you’re engaged, you’re probably on the hunt for that perfect dress! That dress that will be worn on the most special day of your life. If you are anything like me, I had no idea what I wanted for my wedding dress. In fact, I thought I had one idea and found that when I got to the dress shop, I went a totally different route than what I had originally planned!
Check out some tips on choosing that perfect dress for your wedding!
1) The first and most important thing to do is pick a budget for your wedding dress. If you’re paying for it yourself, talk to your fiance and figure out what your budget will be. If your parents are paying for it or helping pay for it, sit down with them and figure out how much of the wedding budget will be spent on the dress. Figure out is $1,500 really means $1,500 or if it could possibly mean $1,700 if you just found the perfect dress. Now here’s the kicker… once you go shopping for your dress, stick to that budget. Don’t even try on a dress outside of your budget. The worst thing in the world is finding a dress you LOVE, try it on, and find out that it’s $1,000 over your budget and you can’t afford it. Don’t let the dress shop talk you into trying on a dress that is out of your price range either. Stick to your budget.
2) Don’t take a giant entourage with you to buy your dress. You may have seen shows like “Say Yes to the Dress” on TLC and see when the bride shows up with her entire wedding party, mother, mother-of-the-groom, cousins, and even fathers sometimes. This can lead to “too many cooks in the kitchen” and cause a great deal of stress when you try on dresses. The last thing you want it 20 different opinions being thrown at you, stressing you out, or confusing you. Take a few people with you: your maid of honor, mom, future mother-in-law (if you have a good relationship), sister. Don’t worry about hurting feelings of people who don’t get invited. They can always come with you to a later fitting or do what my sister-in-law did: we all went out to breakfast and all got our bridesmaids dresses together and got fitted together. This was a fun way for all of us to get together, shop for dresses, but not overwhelm the bride when she wanted to buy her dress.
3) Look online or in magazines ahead of time to figure out your style preference. Pinterest is a bride’s best friend in this day and age. Pin away, my friend. Pin away. You might, however, go in with a style, or even a specific dress in mind, and find once you get there, that you like a totally different type of dress. This was me! I found I kept picking up lace dresses when I tried them on. Not once did I look at a lace dress before I went to the shop. I ended up purchasing an a-line dress with a lace overlay.
4) Don’t be afraid to commit. You CAN find your dress on the first trip out. There is no need to go to four or five different bridal shops every weekend for a month if you found a dress you loved right away. Just consider it the easiest part of the wedding process! I found my dress the first day I went out and it happened to be the first dress I tried on. I could have gone to the appointment I had scheduled the following weekend; but I knew I wanted MY dress. I got it the day I tried it on and walked out of the store with it. (They were having a sale that I couldn’t pass up!)
5) Figure out if you want to buy your dress from a local bridal boutique or a larger chain dress shop like David’s Bridal. The local boutiques tend to cost more, but have more original and different dresses, while the chain shops have more mass produced dresses, but at a cheaper cost. I ended up with my dress from David’s Bridal and did not care for one second that the girl in the dressing room right next to me saw my dress on me, liked it, tried it on in her size, and also bought the same dress. Some girls, like one of my friends from college, said she would have put her dress back and chosen another one. Personally, I don’t care about stuff like that; but you should decide if that’s important to you.
