How Long Can I Put It Off?

Fact:  We are five and a half months out from our wedding and I don't have a dress.

Fact:  Every time I think about wedding dresses, I feel like I want to cry (and I don't mean happy cry.)

Now that I've set the stage, let's get to the backstory.  I like to think of myself as a somewhat fashion-conscious person, but I am by no means an avid shopper or a fashionista.  Let's just chalk that up to being a plus-size girl for nearly my entire life.  So this dress thing is hard, hard, hard and I am seriously not excited about it.  (Kid you not, I am choking back tears as I'm typing this.)  I thought that waiting until I was at the six month mark would kick in some sense of urgency that could potentially turn into excitement, but it just hasn't.  Not to be dramatic, but I feel paralyzed - not willing to do what I probably should do and not sure what I want to do instead. 

Here are the problems I've identified so far.  Number one: I want really badly to love every gorgeous inch of me, but I'm seriously unhappy with my upper arms.  And though there are many things a wedding dress can tuck, lift, camouflage, or enhance, upper arms are not generally one of them.  So I kinda want to wear some sort of elbow-length jacket with my dress so that I can highlight my favorite assets, but I don't want to look overly modest.  (Not that there's anything wrong with modesty, of course.  It's just not what I'm going for.)

image via Traditional Wedding Dress

Number two:  I have a really hard time picturing myself in a white gown on my wedding day.  In fact, when I was a teenager I told my mom that if I ever got married I wanted to wear something hot pink and patterned.  My adult self doesn't find that aesthetic quite as appealing any more, but I do find myself drawn to gray-hued designer dresses.  The problem with those dresses is twofold: the sizes and the price.  If I opted to go with a non-white gown that's not a wedding dress, I have an intense fear that I'll just end up looking like like a charicature of a bride rather than myself as a bride.

image via Wedsmack

Number three:  Dress shopping is not convenient for me, and I'm really busy these days.  I can't just make an appointment at any ol' bridal salon and expect to try on a bunch of dresses because plus-size inventory is significantly limited in almost all dress stores.  To that point, I called the Priscilla of Boston store in San Francisco the other day to ask whether they have plus size samples in their stores.  The nice lady told me that almost all of their dresses can be ordered in sizes up to 32 (I think), but the largest samples they carry in their store are a size 14.  She suggested that by leaving the zipper open they could probably "get me into" some of the dresses so I'll have a sense of what a dress will look like on me "before I order it."  What are the chances I'm going to fall in love with a dress if I'm stuffed into it like a bridal sausage?  And am I crazy for thinking that I would never, ever, EVER buy a wedding dress that I couldn't try on first?  I mean, you can't return those things.  So if it comes in and it doesn't look good on me, I'm totally screwed!  That makes me anxious just thinking about it. 

dress by Allure Bridals

And while I'm on this soapbox - for those places that do offer larger sizes in their dresses, would it kill them to show pictures of actual plus-size women in these dresses on their website?  (And don't try to fool me by just using a model that has curves.  That's nice, and they're beautiful, but what I want is "can't fit into a size 14 sample dress" representation, please.) 

Oh, and while I'm making requests for representation, here's another thought: How about some non-White models?  It can't be as hard as all that, can it? 

image of real bride via Allure Brides

'kay, I think I'm done with this point. Moving on...

Number four:  I'm cheap and wedding dresses aren't.  Our budget currently stands at $1600 for ALL apparel and accessories for BOTH of us. I can always use my own money to go over that amount, but ideally I'd stay within budget because it doesn't really mesh with my values to spend a lot of money on a dress I'll wear for a day. The only potential way around this would be to re-sell my dress after the wedding, which I'm totally fine with. But even with that option, I still can't afford to pony up the kind of money needed to buy most of the dresses I see advertised out there.

dress by Monique Lhuillier ($$$$ = $7000-$20,000)

 

To be honest there are probably way more reasons than the ones I've written about here, but I'll spare you from this becoming any more of a downward spiral than it already is! I think I've made my point abudantly clear - for a million and one reasons, I've put off figuring out that whole wedding dress thing and now I'm feeling really stuck.  What do I do?  

If you ever felt paralyzed in the dress shopping process, how did you move past it?