Choosing the right bridal dress design for you
Believe it or not, on your wedding day, your groom won’t care about your wedding dress. Your guests won’t either. And, if you’ve chosen the right bridal dress, nor will you.
You might be a little surprised to hear that. Especially from a bridal boutique whose job it is to match you with your perfect wedding dress. After all, if nobody is going to be that fussed about your wedding dress, why not just cut a couple of holes in a sheet and be done with it?
To understand properly, let’s look at the reasons why nobody will care about your dress on your wedding day. And why it’s important that you know this before you start looking for your perfect wedding dress.
Where everyone’s attention will be on your wedding day
Let’s start with your groom. His main concern is that you actually turn up. If you appear at the other end of the aisle, roughly on time, you could be wearing a bin bag for all he’ll care. For him, the most important thing about your wedding day is you. You are all he wants in the whole wide world. And the only thing he’ll be looking at all day long is you. Not your dress, but you as a person: his bride, his freshly minted wife, the love of his life.
As for your guests, they’ll be far too busy with each other to look at you. Weddings are fantastic social events that refresh the bonds between family, friends and sometimes even communities. People haven’t seen each other in a while, there is lots to talk about. You are giving people an occasion to do so face-to-face. And they will gratefully take that opportunity. Which means they’ll spend most of their time talking to everyone else except you.
OK. Your groom only cares that you are there. Your guests are too busy catching up. Fine. They have their own reasons for not paying too much attention to your carefully chosen bridal dress. But what about you? How come you aren’t either?
The answer is simple. You will be caught up in the excitement of the occasion as well. The day will go at a ferocious pace. (Make sure you take a few moments to breathe and take it all in, won’t you?) You’ll be carried along by the joyful experience. You won’t even notice your wedding dress after a while — at least, if you’ve chosen the right one. Because the right bridal gown doesn’t just make you look fantastic, it makes you feel fantastic. In fact, it makes you feel so fantastic you don’t even notice you’re wearing it. The right dress simply becomes part of you, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in your wedding day and enjoy it fully. The wrong bridal dress will do the exact opposite.
Here’s how to find the perfect wedding dress.
The four bridal dress design shapes
Broadly speaking, there are four shapes for wedding dresses, and you’ll find your body shape suits some better than others. But don’t worry. That doesn’t mean you’ll be limited in choice. Each foundation shape provides a basis for breathtaking fashion and plenty of dresses to choose from.
Starting with the loosest fit and getting progressively more fitted to the body:
A-line
A-line wedding dresses are so-called because they resemble the shape of the capital letter ‘A’: narrower at the top and progressively wider towards the bottom. This is a lovely design that is very independent of your body shape.
Ballgown
The easiest way to describe this shape is ‘the classic Disney princess dress’. The dresses worn by Snow White, Cinderella and Belle. The kind of dress you’d expect to see at a royal ball. The bodice is fitted and the skirt flares out in a full bell shape.
Fit and flare
Fit and flare dresses hug your upper body and continue to fit snugly over your hips to about halfway down your thighs, where they flare out. They have a silhouette like a mermaid, which is why they are often referred to as mermaid dresses.
All of these dress shapes have some form of structure to them. In other words, they are able to hold their shape once you have them on. There is another type of dress that brides sometimes aspire to, but unfortunately isn’t suited to many.
Sheath dress
A sheath wedding dress is the kind of dress you can get away with if you’re a professional pilates instructor or a super model, or happen to have been gifted with phenomenal genes. It has no structure to it whatsoever, no definition. So it's your body shape doing all the work.
Your body and your dress is like a marriage
When choosing the right dress shape for you, the rule is that your body will decide the dress, rather than the dress somehow changing your body.
Also, keep in mind that when you see what you think is your dream dress worn by a professional model, what you really love about the dress is how gorgeous it looks on the model.
That means not every bridal dress style you see is right for you. Especially if all you are basing your judgment on is supermodel good looks. Far more important is how the dress makes you feel. It’s a bit like how you chose your groom. Obviously he’s handsome, but he also makes you feel wonderful.
Therefore, always keep the two ‘Cs’ in mind when choosing your dress:
Is the dress comfortable?
Does it make me feel confident?
If it does both of those things, you’ll float through your wedding day and barely give your bridal gown a second thought. Because it is so right for you that it is quietly doing its job of making you look and feel amazing, filling you with confidence without distracting you and getting in your way.
Forget the supporting act
In the 1990s, wedding dresses were like torture devices at worst and like mobile restraints at best. Lots of corseted structure squeezed around the midriff, tightly cutting into your ribs. Back then, looks often won out over comfort.
Fortunately those days are behind us and wedding dresses today focus more on comfort as well as elegance. That doesn’t mean they don’t have some body sculpting structure to them, but you’ll find that generally speaking there is far less than in the past.
You might be tempted to add your own additional body enhancing support, in the form of Spanx shapewear or something similar. But that’s not something we believe in at Say I Do, if only because you’re building your wedding day around the wrong piece of clothing. Suddenly, your structural undergarment is the star of the show, and it’s guiding your choice of bridal dress. ‘If I squeeze my body this way and that way, maybe I can wear this dress…’ But isn’t it better to let the dress itself make you look amazing and give you that warm glow of confidence?
Our recommendation: all you need is some simple high-waisted underwear and a well-fitting bra. Comfort over constriction. It’s a long day, after all, you want to be able to breath.
Your dress and your hair
One final thing to think about when you are considering dress shape: your hair. Or rather, don’t consider your hair.
A question we often get is about wearing hair up or down.
First of all, wear it how you want to wear it. As always, what makes you feel comfortable will make you look radiant. In fact, you don’t need to change your hairstyle at all for your wedding day. After all, you’re not supposed to turn up at the altar looking like a completely different human being. Your guests will wonder whether they’ve sat down in the wrong venue.
The only dress designs that you might consider wearing your hair up for are dresses with a high neck or a closed neck. But that’s not a hard and fast rule, by any means.
You might be worried that if you wear your hair down it will hide the back of your dress. But the great thing about hair is that it’s constantly moving, as you turn your head or being softly blown by a breeze. So the back of your dress will be visible to some degree throughout the day.
And as we’ve said before, nobody will be scrutinising your dress, let alone the back of it. Your groom will be looking at your face. Your guests will be talking among themselves. And you aren’t physically capable of looking at the back of your dress at all.
Besides, if you’ve chosen the right dress, once you’ve zipped it up at the start of the day, you’ll forget all about it as one of the most magnificent days in your life washes over you.