Manolo for the Brides

Word in my inbox is that bouquet jewelry will be the hot new thing in the upcoming months, but I am taking this revelation with a grain of rice seeing as that it comes from a retailer who sells bouquet jewelry. Integrating gems and pearls into bridal bouquets is nothing new, after all, though I haven’t seen many monogram jewels for bouquets other than in shop windows.

Still, said retailer (specifically USA Bride) does claim that sales of bouquet jewelry in 2009 are up 34% over 2008, so who knows… if you’re a bride keen to jump on the bouquet jewelry trend, USA Bride is having a bit of a sale. Should you buy a bit of bouquet bling — or anything else, as far as I can tell — use promo code saving10.

Have a girl baby, get gifts, find yourself in a wonderland of pink, pink, pink. That’s the world I’m living in right now, and I’ve never been *that* partial to pink, particularly when it comes to the baby variety. Ditto for baby blue and variations thereof. If those are among your favorite hues, I do apologize, but I personally prefer a palette with a tad more saturation like these from Bespoke Events London.

While this afternoon wedding does look a bit like my daughter’s wardrobe, the depth of color in the tablecloth, vases, and the chairs offset the lighter pinks and purples found in the floral centerpieces. Overall the effect is very warm and feminine without being juvenile.

This evening wedding, on the other hand, is icy cool and very sophisticated. The low blue lighting mirrors the darkness outside and ensures that the silver centerpieces really sparkle.

Both are lovely, don’t you think?

As an aside, Bespoke Events London is the keeper of something they call “The Secret Collection,” an exclusive range of changing secret venues discoverable only by geographical coordinates for the ultimate in discretion and privacy. I can’t imagine ever receiving a wedding invitation with GPS coordinates instead of a proper address, but it could be fun for a theme wedding where the majority of the invitees were technologically savvy.

Hey ho, caption fans! It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness!

You all know how this works. I post a picture simply crying out to be captioned in some way, you all send in those captions via the comments function, and next week I will declare a winner whom we shall laud ad nauseum.

And so, without further ado, let’s take a look at the image du jour.

Ready…set…snark!

When I announced my engagement, several people told me there are two things ‘every’ bride does: grow her hair long and go on a diet. Me? I did neither. I admit part of the reason I didn’t grow my hair out was…well…it was already as long as it goes, which is about hip length. That seemed like plenty of hair for my purposes, anyway.

Still, in reaction to comments like that, a tiny piece of me wanted to go out and get a buzz cut.

I didn’t, though I’ve had one before and rocked it pretty well, actually. But that gives you an idea of just how much it annoyed me to be informed that only long-haired women were welcome at the altar.

The attitude seems to carry on to this day, too. In a google image search for ’short-haired bride’ I found three measly pages of images. In one for ’short hair’ + ‘bride’ I got a lot more pages…and at least 90% of them were of long-haired brides. One image presented for my consideration was of Nicole Kidman’s wedding to Keith Urban, where his hair wasn’t exactly short, either. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against long hair on a man. In fact, Mr. Twistie’s hair has been considerably longer than mine numerous times. It’s just that wasn’t what I was looking for.

What I was looking for was images of brides rocking the short locks and looking fabulous – particularly if they did so while not adding hairpieces or making faux long styles. Well, I found a few. These I pass on as inspiration to brides who wear their hair short and don’t want to grow it out for the wedding.

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$19,580 will buy you a lot of things, including (but not limited to) a wedding gown that is in desperate need of a course of steroids and some topical hydrocortisone cream. The “Medea” wedding gown by Elizabeth Fillmore is one such gown. Don’t worry, though — it’s not contagious.

I was doing my daily review of the new content on Jezebel when I was struck by a post about wedding mockery… specifically the wedding mockery at the blog Tacky Weddings. Sadie had this to say about the site:

But if you’re a softie like me, after looking at a few you’ll feel bad. After all, most of these brides and grooms look happy, are delighted with their weddings and clearly put thought and work into them. What’s more, it seems cruel to feature them without permission (not like they’d give it.) Celebs or reality TV mavens putting themselves out there for public consumption is one thing; the vast majority of these people are anything but.

Naturally, I had to go check it out for myself, because I do love a good trainwreck of a wedding! But as I browsed through the content on Tacky Weddings, I couldn’t help but agree with Sadie. When we post pictures from real weddings here at Manolo for the Brides, we try to be kind, and if we do mock just a little bit, we usually do so gently and in the spirit of fun.

I mean ugly bridesmaid dresses and funny wedding cakes are one thing (especially if a reader has sent in their own wacky or outdated wedding photos), but ugly brides? While one of the images featured is of a dude wearing a wedding dress, the rest appear to be brides whose ‘ugliness’ comes from the fact that they’re not members of the white European upper class. That’s just plain nasty, if you ask me.

I’m going to go with HATE on this one — not hate for the Tacky Weddings, which is overall a fun blog good for a bit of a laugh, but hate for the notion that it’s okay to get flat out mean when discussing a real person’s nuptials. Calling a wedding gown or a bridal bouquet tacky is fine in my book. Calling a bride tacky (or ugly or stupid) for wearing that gown and carrying that bouquet isn’t my cup of tea.

What say you?

(PS — I am REALLY digging the mens’ suits in the above photo)

Reader comments have made it pretty clear that wedding cake still has a special place in most people’s hearts. As much as we love dessert bars and candy buffets and other wedding sweets, tiers of spongecake and frosting (not to mention other fillings!) still rule the roost. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend macaron towers as an alternative to traditional wedding cakes. Sort of an alternative, anyway. Some of the towers, like the ones above, are simply French macarons displayed on a base of some sort, while others — the best sort, in my opinion — are macarons displayed on a tiered wedding cake. It’s the best of both worlds!

A now-deleted post (that you can still see in Google’s archives) by blogger Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review has been weighing heavily on my mind. Entitled “You’ve Never Met a Bridezilla Like a Feminist Bridezilla,” the post is little more than an excerpt from a post by blogger Jessica Valenti of Feministing. Valenti, you see, is getting married. She also identifies as a feminist. While Lopez’s post doesn’t include any outright insults directed toward Valenti, the title implies that there is something unusual and perhaps even a little icky about the thoughtful way Valenti is approaching matrimony.

What, I have to wonder, is wrong with carefully considering whether or not to take the name of one’s partner… with thinking about the plight of those who cannot at this time get legally married… or with delving into the origins of established wedding traditions? My take is that the answer is nothing. Nothing is wrong with planning an examined wedding, and anyone who is threatened by another woman’s choice to plan just such a wedding probably has a pretty big chip on her shoulder.

What it comes down to, in my mind, is this: Not taking a partner’s last name isn’t automatically a feminist decision any more than taking a partner’s last name indicates that you’re a slave to the patriarchy. The same goes for wearing a white wedding gown, tossing the bouquet, including gendered words in your wedding vows, and being walked down the aisle by daddy. The reasons people do or don’t do these things go waaaay beyond “I’m rebelling against socially-sanctioned gender inequality” or “I’m a woman, so this is what I have to do.”

The feminist wedding is basically the examined wedding, which is what most brides and grooms really ought to be planning whether they identify as feminists or not. Sometimes the choices they make will adhere to the tenets of feminism (making it an uppercase Feminist Wedding), and sometimes they won’t, but to imply that Jessica Valenti is a ‘feminist bridezilla’ because she’s exploring all her options is patently absurd.

A year or so ago, ABC News aired a What Would You Do segment called A Wedding to Remember: Shopping for the ‘Perfect’ Dress. In it, brides-to-be took their loved ones wedding gown shopping and pretended that they had fallen in love with dresses that, shall we say, fall outside the current bridal norm. The objective was to find out whether honesty is the best policy when a bride-to-be has found “The One,” even when it’s completely wrong for her.

In reading the summary of the segment, what I found particularly interesting were the different reactions the brides-to-be who participated received from relatives and friends.

As the scenario played out, the [companions of the bride] teetered on just how serious Andrea was about the fuchsia dress. Ultimately, however, Andrea was overruled by her dutiful friends and bridesmaids.

“I don’t approve,” Katie said. “I’m sorry.”

“I won’t let you,” said bridesmaid Maria Cacucciolo. “It’s… it’s a nightmare … I’m gonna be honest with you. It’s all wrong. Absolutely not!”

Now I’m sure that Katie and Maria had the best of intentions. They merely wanted to protect someone they cared about from making what to them must have seemed like a monumental mistake. That said, the fact remains that a dress is just a dress, even when it is a wedding gown, and a tacky, ugly, weird, silly, or just-not-to-your-tastes dress (one that covers everything needing covering, anyway) is never truly a ‘monumental mistake.’ What if the bride-to-be had really adored the fuchsia wedding gown? I somehow doubt that she would have thanked her friends for caring enough not to let her wear her perfect gown!

I much preferred this response:

Rebekah [the sister of another bride-to-be] told us why she supported her sister’s decision.

“There comes a point when it’s your integrity versus … what you think you should say,” she explained. And when it came to her sister, she had to ask herself, “Where’s that line drawn with white lies? Who is it hurting versus who would it help? And so in this case, I think it’s really about supporting her.”

Even though the whole thing was a set-up, that’s more like it. The perfect wedding gown only has to be perfect to the person who is going to wear it, so why browbeat someone you care about into wearing a gown other than the one she really loves? If I knew in my heart of hearts that I’d shamed my sister or my friend into wearing a second-choice gown or, worse, a gown that *I* liked, I would feel terribly guilty. Maybe I’m too sentimental about these things, but it seems to me that if you can’t say anything nice about your loved one’s wedding gown, you should say something benign like “It really is your style” or “Wow, that’s colorful!” No lies, no nastiness, and no one gets hurt.