I love shopping. Trust me on this one: I can spot a marked-down bargain hidden behind rail after rail of overpriced dresses in a flash. I can hunt down the perfect pair of heels in a shopping mall in less than 30 minutes flat. I can even tell if something will fit me before bothering to hit the changing-room queue. Yes, I have the art of shopping waxed.
So when it came to shopping for my wedding dress – something I did back in London with my mom and sister to avoid a Skype-filled, cross-continental disaster as per pretty much the rest of my wedding planning – I was confident, excited, even.
After all, how hard could it be? Unlike my usual hunting ground, the dreaded shopping mall, where everyone walks so slowly and small children are never supervised, wedding-dress shopping meant boutiques and specialist stores and no small children. Bliss!
You even have to book appointments in advance. Hello, personalised service, attentive assistants and staff who actually know what they’re doing. The perfect shopping environment, right? Wrong. You see, there are a few things no-one tells you about wedding-dress shopping. Things that, in my mind, are rather crucial.
I’d already set myself up for disaster before I’d even left the house. I wasn’t prepared for having to prance about in my underwear in front of a crowd of shop assistants, not to mention passersby wanting to get a glimpse of a bride-to-be in a dreamy gown.
So my rather rushed choice of Bridget Jones panties, that used to be white but are now, well, not, and a nude, strapless bra speckled with scarlet stains from that time when someone spilt red wine all over me, wasn’t exactly ideal.
And since most wedding dresses are impossible to zip yourself into, I was going to have to get used to a whole lot of underwear flashing as a hoard of assistants swooped in with each gown, zipping me up, tucking me in and buttoning me tight.
I might have been a little less red-faced about the whole underwear thing, though, if I hadn’t also had to deal with the one of the worst kinds of shopping tortures known to ladykind: the fact that every single wedding dress on the rails was a sample size. That’s model size, pre-pubescent size, not-normal size… tiny.
So now I’m standing in my granny underwear beneath harsh changing-room lights that highlight every inch of cellulite and fat roll, sucking in until I go light-headed while an assistant tries to squeeze me into a sample size. After trying on exactly one dress, I was already ready to yell at the assistant. No, it will never fit and no, sucking in more won’t change the size of my hips and, no, leaving the back undone so I can ‘imagine’ what the dress could like after some ‘severe alterations’ does not make me feel any better.
So instead of my mom and sister tearing up with joy as I glided in and out of the changing room, each time in a different gown, until they pointed at one and screamed in unison, “It’s perfect!”, there was a whole lot of undone zips and squinting as we all tried to conjure up an image of what the dress might look like, possibly, maybe, if it actually fitted me. That childhood fantasy about the fun of wedding dress shopping was officially obliterated.
And then there were those awkward moments when I thought I may have (finally!) found The One – 20 dresses and all my dignity later – and smugly strutted out of the changing room to show it off, only for my mother or sister to declare with horror, “Dear God, that’s hideous!”
And so I returned, head bowed, back into the changing room, defeated and facing yet another rail of dresses to squeeze my battered and embarrassed body into.
But there is something good about all of this, aside from the fact that it’s all geared towards an incredible big day. When you do actually find The One, after all of the humiliation and exhaustion, nothing can beat that euphoric feeling of triumph.
It’s like you’ve thwarted the universe and finally won the most exhausting treasure hunt ever. For me, The One came in the form of delicate Chantilly lace and a luminescent, antique-gold hue, a soft, flowing silhouette and a lace-trimmed veil.
Was it worth the hunt? Definitely. Would I ever go wedding-dress browsing again? Hell, no – I’ll stick to shopping malls and bargain heel-hunting from now on, thank you.
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