Wedding Dresses

Monster Brides

As a designer, when spring comes around, it’s hard not to think about weddings. Yesterday my friend Gail was asking me some advice about working with a bride as a client and I flatly blurted out , “Say No!” I was surprised at my abrupt sureness.
Over the years I have made many wedding dresses, and with a few exceptions, they have mostly been varying degrees of monster brides.
When I got to a place in my work where I didn’t have to take those projects, I quickly started to refuse or make my rates so outrageous that I could scare them off easily.

I think the stress of these projects and the constant changing mindset of the client is very hard to understand unless you are experiencing it firsthand. Of course they are feeling so much pressure to have a perfect day, and to look their very best, which in turn puts a lot of that stress on the designer of the dress. I’ll admit I am also a very sensitive person so I care way too much and pay attention to every detail.
There are also the physical aspects that are unpredictable : losing or gaining weight from stress, conditions for the wedding dress changing, venue changes, or coordinating with weather.

Week to week what a bride wanted would be changing and it was hard to understand in many situations what to do to make them happy. Receiving long late night emails from brides with new design ideas became the norm- everyone is a designer for a wedding dress and all bets are off. It started to feel like being hired more as a therapist than a designer.

Now, I do love making dresses for guests to attend weddings. That is my specialty, and I will say I made a few 2nd marriage dresses and those are a breeze and actually very enjoyable. All the pressure of the wedding perfection is nonexistent the second time around, so the bride is very confident and usually wants to do something fun. So if you’re getting remarried or going to a wedding I’m all ears.

But what about me, I was a bride once I thought to myself the other day. What was I like?
I asked my husband in the car yesterday was I a monster bride?
He laughed and said no.
As someone who had zero wedding fantasies, a wedding dress was not a construct I had formed ideas about in my head, even as a fashion designer.

I am a panther like shopper ( known for my speed and stealthy shopping agility when I have my mind set on something.) Leading up to my wedding, I just decided one day to go shopping by myself at Bergdorf Goodman.
I walked the two floors of women’s designer clothing scanning the racks and I quickly settled on a dress I liked. It wasn’t white or ivory and didn’t remotely resemble any kind of trope of a wedding dress. In fifteen minutes flat I fell in love with a dress, slammed my credit card on the counter and that was that. I was saying to Andrew yesterday that I don’t think I really processed what I was buying the dress for at the time. I just saw it as an excuse to buy a beautiful dreamy dress I normally couldn’t afford. It was a thrill to trot out of Bergdorf’s with my garment bag in tow knowing I was all set. I didn’t have second thoughts and I did not take it out of the bag again until the day of my wedding.

True to my day to day fashion, the dress was black and ivory silk. I had been following this designer Rodolfo Paglialunga at Vionnet. He had been design director for many years at Prada and Romeo Gigli before that and I loved his work. It had a Madame Grès like draping to it, and it was both simple and quite complex when you looked at it carefully- a designers dream

.

Sometimes people ask me why I didn’t make my own dress. It didn’t appeal to me at the time. I really wanted to have the experience other people have in finding something beautiful made for them and just purchasing it. Putting laborious hours into my own dress just sounded like work.

Later that week, my friend’s Britt and Christina took me to Prada and bought me a pair of shoes one bought the left and one the right, it was very sweet. I loved them so much. Sadly my feet grew after I had my son so I only got to wear them once. Now they sit in the dressing room of my shop but they gets lots of love and admiration there. My friend Lisa designed my flowers to coordinate with my dress: white peonies, ranunculus and black calla lilies with some for my hair in back. I found some point d’esprit stockings from Fogal and there was my look.

Andrew and I are both very informal people so I’ll spare the personal details but we married on my best friend’s roof and did the planning and setting up ourselves and it was the best day surrounded by close friends and family.
I really enjoyed myself and when I look back on it I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

I hope everyone has a lovely week. xx Kathy