Manolo for the Brides

The recent discourse on appropriate dress over at the Shoe Blog put me in a mind to contemplate hats. At my own wedding, I asked my mother and her ladywife to pick out some stylish headwear for the ceremony. I suppose they are lucky that I had not yet discovered the French wedding hat tradition, for I no doubt would have requested that they spend obscene amounts of money outfitting their heads.

According to photographer Bertrand Celce, who snapped the photo below, the wedding hat must be “original, classy, and elegant.”

Whoever invented this tradition was inspired, and a wedding without hats would not be a real wedding…or at least wouldn’t deserve that we try our best for the best of all days. Don’t forget that the groom and the bride often met at a previous wedding a few months before. And this particular hat on that particular face wasn’t neutral on that special day. Is there a better reason to care for the hats?

To see more of these uber fantastic hats, many of which are architectural wonders that stimulate the mind as well as the eye, have a peek at this blog entry by Tom Sanford. I think that I shall have to find myself a gorgeous and eye-catching hat to wear at the next wedding I attend so I can begin spreading the wedding hat tradition among my friends and peers.

For some reason it really irks me when shops assume that bridesmaid dresses and prom gowns are interchangeable. In my mind, there is the potential for overflow, but it only works in one direction. Many dresses created for bridesmaids would make lovely prom wear, but relatively few of the gowns created for today’s senior proms would look right in a matrimonial setting. In the 80s, perhaps, one could go back and forth with impunity, but modern brides seem to be a lot hipper to the notion that there is no reason to outfit ‘maids in itchy, shiny, sequined pouf designed in accordance with the tastes of Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Okay, /rant. I just wanted an excuse to compose a biggish block of text to sit on top of some pretty pictures. The bridesmaid dresses would never be mistaken for something that came from Estelle’s Dressy Dresses…which, incidentally, is where I bought multiple prom dresses back in the day. As much as I love color, I inevitably look back to black whenever I want to feel swingy, sexy, saucy, or sophisticated.

Now, let’s flesh things out a bit with some other nuptial essentials. Who says you can’t build an entire wedding around a really fantastic bridesmaid dress? I could keep going for hours! If you happen to go the black route and find that people close to you question your choice, just remind them that your own joy and the happiness of your guests will provide all of the color your day could possibly need.

This is a classic photographic trick, but one that nonetheless elicits a “wow” from most people when done well. I first came across the Flickr group devoted to heart shadow photography after following a link on Our One Heart, and I just couldn’t resist reposting the link.

If the usual photo of his and hers hands holding sparkling wedding bands isn’t for you, why not ask your photog to snap a double heart pic using both of your rings? And if you’re long since hitched, there’s no reason you can’t rig up a light source, grab a book, and take your own photographs. Just be sure you read the text beneath the ring — if the first words that jump out at you are swaggering, cold, and cocksure, you may want to choose a different book.

Hubert de Givenchy said that in a 1985 issue of Vogue. The site linked through the picture above came to me through a recommendation from a lady of my acquaintance who used it to choose a snazzy new haircut. Since I don’t often talk about wedding locks — mainly because my relationship with my own “do” is so strained — I thought it might be time to put hair back on the program.

Makeover Solutions touts itself as “your best friend for all things beauty.” A free trial lets you try out hair and makeup options on a creepy, digitally rendered model that vaguely resembles you. If you sign up, you can upload an actual photo and give yourself 100 virtual makeovers in the course of ten minutes.

Is it useful? That depends on whether or not you are mega concerned about your wedding hairstyle. I did not follow the commonly outlined rules because I had neither the time nor the money to test run updoes in the weeks before my wedding. Besides, my stylist was in a different state, and he’s known for his major magazine spreads, so I figured it would all turn out all right. And it did, happily enough! I know, however, that not everyone is so lucky.

Do I know myself? I guess so. All I had to say was that I preferred a looser look to something more structured. No uber tight curls for me, thanks.

VERSUS

So what if it’s commonly considered bad luck to wear a second hand wedding gown. Since when is it bad luck to save some bucks? Preowned Wedding Dress (don’t click just yet) wants to change the way brides-to-be whose budgets don’t allow for much wriggle room shop for their dresses. The site also aims to change how newly married ladies dispose of those dresses.

I would love to be able to rave about a site like this…a site that simply brings buyers and sellers together in a fluid way. Really, I would. Gowns are apparently are listed by size, price, and designer, and each is posted with up to five images so shoppers can get an idea of what they’re looking at. Seller’s listings cost a mere $25 to post and last a full 12 months or until the gown is sold. All in all, it sounds like a fantastic idea.

But sadly, I can’t tell you much about the range of dresses for sale, as I couldn’t look at any of the listings because the site repeatedly froze Firefox. Error messages informed me that the site’s “applet counter” was “notinited,” whatever that means. Click at your own risk, people. If you do get through, let me know what you think of the selection on offer.

UPDATE: Others have been able to view the site just fine, indicating that it may be a problem with my particular version of Firefox, so browse away!

As I said yesterday, I’ve spent an entire week watching every wedding-related reality show I could pick up on my cable package. It’s been grueling. I never realized how many shows there are on TV about wedding planning, or how little useful information can be gleaned from most of them.

I did, however, pick up on some interesting social messages these shows are trying to sell us on, many of which I found outright bizarre as well as unhelpful. Here’s what I kept seeing on show after show:

1: Budgets are made to be broken, and anyone who tries to keep one intact is the villian of the piece. Again and again I saw fathers, grooms, and even the occasional bride called cheap or gazed upon more in pity than in anger because they felt it was unreasonable to blow the budget by the equivilant of the Gross National Product of Brazil. I saw wedding planners work with brides and their mothers to ‘hide’ expenses from daddy so he wouldn’t blow his top – expenses like a second multi-thousand dollar reception dress because the multi-thousand wedding gown was too much to boogie in all night long. I heard a bride chastised for thinking since the flowers didn’t mean that much to her she’d rather get them from a grocery store than a professional florist, even if she could get more flowers for a hundred dollars less and was at least as happy with the result.

2: Wedding planners are wonderful even when they don’t do their jobs well. Some of the planners I watched did a really fabulous job. A couple even attempted to keep the budget from completely skyrocketing completely out of control. One amazing one even got a couple pretty much everything they wanted for two thousand dollars less than their stated budget, and said budget was well under $20,000 to begin with. On the other hand, there was no negative commentary on the wedding planner who allowed an $8,000 backyard wedding to bloat into a $30,000 backyard wedding even with the bride managing to borrow a lot of plants and decorations. This is also the planner who envisioned a dramatic, billowy fabric curtain to define the wedding/reception areas of the yard and allow the bride a dramatic entrance…only to discover the night before the wedding that she needed another fifty yards of fabric to make it happen.

(more…)

Never let it be said that I will not take a bullet for the readers of this fine blog.

What bullet might that be, you may ask?

A solid week of watching reality shows about weddings, that’s the answer. I’ll have some observations about the lessons I learned from these shows tomorrow. For now I just have one question:

Why do women sign up to be featured on Bridezillas?

I know they get something, because as my brain screamed at the end of every episode I saw I knew it was drowning out the sound of the announcer telling us what resort or hotel the couple got to stay at for three days in return for having their reputations trashed on national television over the course of two episodes. But is that really all they get? Is it really worth it? Some shows I can understand being willing to be on them for the sake of a couple nights at a nice hotel, but this one?

Also I had to wonder at some of the choices of brides. While most of the women I saw profiled on the show were definitely doing everything in their power to live down to the Bridezilla label, there was at least one who I felt was not only not Bridezilla, but was more of a pathetic sad sack who couldn’t get anyone to help her with anything. She had no organizational skills and her friends and family spent most of their time ignoring her or laughing at her for wanting a nice wedding. Okay, her waterworks got to be a bit much, but I would have cried, too, if I’d been stuck cleaning up my own reception in my wedding gown with only one or two people half-heartedly helping out – none of whom even seemed to be the groom. By what stretch of the imagination is this Bridezilla behavior?

Could it be that there weren’t enough actual Bridezillas out there volunteering for the show?

But my question remains: why would anyone go out of their way to don the mantle of Bridezilla?

I just don’t get it.

Newlyweds Nick and Michaela Beardshaw just wanted to incorporate Nick’s love of WWII reenactment into their wedding. What they got was a BBC reporter calling them Nazis on an edition of BBC1’s Panorama shown last month. Sure, Michaela is a German native, and Nick did dress in the standard uniform of a Second World War German army doctor.

But, Nick claims, he’s not actually the Nazi sympathizer he was made out to be on the BBC. Guests at the ceremony represented various WWII participant nations, not just Germany, but viewers were not shown the guests dressed as British and US soldiers. And when viewers heard Deutschland Uber Alles playing during the ceremony, Nick says it’s because the BBC dubbed it over I’ll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time for added shock value.

[Nick] claims that when he realised what the programme was about he asked for the footage not to be used.

He denied he is sympathetic to Nazi beliefs or has any link with neo-Nazi groups and has complained to the BBC and broadcasting watchdog Ofcom about the programme.

While I can’t say I think Nick and Michaela made the wisest choice when deciding on their wedding theme, war reenactments do require that players representing both sides participate. Some folks play the Axis powers and some folks play the Allies — and Nick just happens to be a member of the Axis Forces Re-enactment Association. I do hope they get an apology from the reporter who misrepresented them because the show undoubtedly cast a shadow over their newlywed glow.