Fans of TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress and/or its spinoff Say Yes to the Dress Atlanta, are about to get another dose of weekly bridal gown shopping reality in the form of another spinoff: Say Yes to the Dress: Big Bliss.
Yes, we’ll get the Kleinfeld’s drama as more bountifully built women experience it. Starting Oct. 1, you can tune in to TLC and see for yourself whether this turns out to be a sensitive portrait of gown shopping while large or whether it turns into another way of shaming and pathologizing women who wear sizes that carry double-digit tags.
Whichever the case, you can guarantee I’ll be checking out the drama and sharing my thoughts with all of you.
I tried to comment on this last night, but my stupid Internet, grrrrr. Basically, the gist was that I’m glad that plus size brides are getting some attention, but I wish they wouldn’t put them in the plus size ghetto. Why can’t they just include plenty of plus size brides on the original show? Maybe, you know, have a little diversity: super short brides, wicked tall brides, big brides, itty-bitty brides, white brides, Pacific Islander brides, etc.
Ugh. I agree, Christa! Why can’t they just feature more kinds of body shapes in the regular shows? Actually, I think they kind of already do that. I’ve seen several shapes of girls. Now I’m just worried they’ll be taking any size variance out of the originals and slapping them all into the new show.
So I’m watching this show right now, and it seems that nobody can even fit in the sample sizes! Ugh. Again. Are we going to have to watch girls have freak outs that she can’t get out of or into a dress every week? Why make a show about a specific segment of the dress shopping community if you can’t even get dresses in that size? Is that supposed to be the drama?
And of course I wound up having DVR issues (in that I forgot to set it and went blissfully off to do other things, never imagining for a moment that I had been so birdbrained), so I didn’t actually see it this week. One thing about TLC, though, is that they re-run everything to death. Also, it’s a series. I’ll catch an episode somewhere along the line.
Unfortunately, though, I’m anticipating an entire series about how sad it is when fat women think they can have pretty things.
I did catch an episode of Say Yes to the Dress Atlanta where a bride was told over and over again not to even try to try on her dream gown because the sample wouldn’t fit her. They also spent a lot of time trying to discourage her from trying on anything similar because ‘of course’ it wasn’t going to work. Blergh! The worst of the situation was that I could tell from looking at the bride’s figure and looking at the picture of the gown that it really would be perfect for her. It was the right shape, the right details… this woman could recognize the perfect gown for her from a photograph.
But no no! They kept trying to get her into less expensive gowns that were of a less flattering silhouette because ‘big girls’ wouldn’t look good in that gown. Seriously, the owner of the place was trying to throw away a sale of an expensive designer dress not because it couldn’t be made in the bride’s size, but because the sample was too small for the lady… though she kept making it about the lady being too big for the sample.
IIRC, the lady left the salon sans a gown and the owner shook her head at the unreasonableness of this non-sample-sized lady.
I damn near threw my shoe through the television.
At least on the original series I’ve seen most of the bountiful ladies treated like actual human beings by the entire staff. In fact, I recall one episode where a bride-to-be was having a bit of a panic attack that she was ‘too fat’ to be pretty in her gown, and Randy, the fashion director, came in and calmed her right down by helping her see that the gown she’d chosen really did make the most of a great figure. She really did look great, too.
I hate that I live in a world where being beautiful is considered so much a question of a number on a measuring tape.
I can’t sit through the Atlanta show because Lori and her staff are terrible – for the reason you mentioned, and more!
For a stereotype-slinging network like TLC, it a pleasant surprise that the New Yorkers come across as sweet and caring, and the Southerners are the nasty ones.
You know what I hate most about Lori? The way she goes into a full bore linear panic every single time a woman brings her fiance into the store with her. She always acts like Jesus himself is going to come into the store and smite everyone dead for it. And she will not shut up about it for one nanosecond. It makes me long to slap her upside the head.
By contrast, the New York show is full of people who actually work hard to find ways to make customers happy, whatever their personal feelings about their (the customers’) choices. The ones who give the brides problems on that show are usually people they brought with them.