PART TWO: BRIDESMAID DRESS PARTY
(yep, just like this.)
Okay, so back to the warehouse full of naked girls. We're back, this time with all the bridesmaids and several kinds of cookies to keep us fortified. Erin’s wedding will be a picnic-y, late summer affair, and she wants her bridesmaids in assorted retro floral day dresses. She’s fine with different colors and patterns, as long as they stay within her general teal/blue/purple/peach-ish color scheme, and she’s incredibly generous and doesn’t want her friends to have to spend millions on dresses; obviously, vintage is the way to go. Inspired by this post, we coordinated a bridesmaid-dress-finding party at Shareen Vintage the weekend after Erin’s bridal consultation.
Joanie, the main head of operations there, was a total peach to work with: from making sure they had a selection of what we were looking for in all the right sizes to patiently answering my 19 obsessive emails. 4 out of 5 ‘maids were able to come, and we started off by pulling anything and everything we liked.
If you want to go frothy mcfrotherson, you are COVERED.
We were kinda going for the opposite… STILL COVERED. That there is our rack of maybes. At this point, we enlisted the S.V. team to assist and advise. They were attending to a slew of parties at once, but did their best to keep us high-priority and went running to the racks many times to find a certain dress they knew would look perfect on one of us. They whisked us in and out of our finery (have you ever been caught in a tight-fitting 50s brocade dress? I have.), and dude, they bring out snacks! Clif bars and mini Snickers are basically designed to fuel bridesmaids trying on dresses.
The Shareen ladies are also quick to whip up insta-belts if they see that a dress needs one, or to suggest in-house tailoring (sleeves off, skirts shorter, etc.) to suit a certain body. And they’re never wrong.
Despite the fantastic selection and dozens of dresses we loved, it was a challenge to find a group that all were in the same color family, flattered each wearer, and didn’t violently clash style-wise. We ditched a whole bunch of adorable minidresses and floaty sundresses before landing on one perfect piece (my purple/blue floral shirtdress) and building off that. The rest came together pretty quickly; the assortment is a tad more formal than we’d originally envisioned, but so is Erin’s dress, so it’ll work. And despite how we all know that once you slap the “wedding” label on anything it gets twice as expensive… our dresses were all around the $50 mark or under, and we’ll definitely be able wear them in the real world afterwards. Too good to be true?
Nah… we still need to find SHOES.
[first photo: "supermodel pillow fight," shot by stephen meisel for vogue, 1993. we die.]
2 comments:
I can't wait to see the pictures from the wedding. You guys are going to look so cute!!
yep, you're going to barf.
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