There’s very little about a wedding that’s easy and stress-free. Trying to pick out the right attire for the day is certainly not going to be one example! Most weddings are, to a great extent, about putting on a show and feeling glamorous for a day, so this really puts the pressure on when it comes to choosing the right dresses and accessories.
Fortunately for you, this here is an epic guide to making sure you pick the wedding attire that’s right for you on your big day! It’s something that’s worth reading well in advance to ensure you have the time to follow it and achieve the best results.
Light Pink Wedding Dress
Begin with the dress
Don’t try to go avant-garde on us. There are a lot of good reasons why most people will pick the actual dress before anything else, and it’s not a trend you should try to buck. After all, the dress is the “main attraction” of your attire, and pretty much everything else has to be picked so as not to clash with it.
With that in mind, you also need to remember that the dress itself shouldn’t clash with you or the venue! A contemporary venue should have a contemporary dress. A more casual or outdoors-y type wedding will call for a different kind of dress. There are people out there who think that choosing the dress first of all turns it into some kind of template, instead of giving it the emotional weight that it deserves. This is nonsense. Pick the dress first, because it’s the best way to choose everything else and avoid some kind of vestiary disaster down the road!
The silhouette
There’s an overwhelming amount of choice when it comes to wedding dresses. You’re going to walk into a store and find about a million different dresses you’d love to wear, even after narrowing the range by budgeting beforehand. (Which, yes, is something you definitely need to do! Otherwise, the costs of this process may end up getting a little bit out of hand.) So you need to find more ways of narrowing your desired range so that you don’t get too overwhelmed. One of the best ways to do this is to narrow things down based on the dress silhouette.
The dress silhouette refers to the specific shapes that constitute a given dress. The lines, cuts and curves will determine what kind of shape you would take on if the lights cut out and you were simply a silhouette in that wedding dress. Put very simply, it can help determine how curvy, slender, or ‘poofy’ you look in that dress! It’s worth finding out precisely what kind of dress ‘shape’ you want – the most popular types are A-lines, ball gowns, mermaids, and trumpets. Make sure you know the differences when it comes to dress silhouettes!
Be an early bird
You should take this to mean two things. The first is that you should start looking for a dress fairly early on. Unless you plan on becoming pregnant, the chances of your body shape changing in any significant way from the time you choose the dress to the day of your wedding is fairly minimal, even if you gain or lose a little weight. So it’s best to do this as early as possible. It’s not simply a case of “getting it out of the way” – although there certainly is an element of it to that, considering how stressful choosing a dress can be! – but it’s also about allowing you more freedom when it comes to time and choice.
So what else does “be an early bird” mean? Basically, when you’re going to visit a wedding dress shop, you should go as early as possible. Think about it: the assistants who work in that store have to deal with several budding brides a day. Just like the vast majority of us, they get a little more weary as the day progresses. I’m not saying that you’re going to get some apathetic and insulting assistant if you go in the late afternoon, but you’re certainly more likely to get someone more energetic and attentive if you go in the morning!
The danger of trends
Anyone who follows fashion knows that there are trends in pretty much every type of clothing – and that includes wedding attire. There are trends in gowns, suits, jewelry, hairstyles… everything. And the problem with trends? Many of them don’t tend to look that great when you look back on them in the future. You may think that you want a modern and trendy wedding, but this doesn’t mean you should take this so far that you end up copying and pasting your wedding attire style from whatever magazine you happened to be reading at the time, or whatever celebrities recently got married.
The best kinds of dresses are truly timeless. They’re the kind that look beautiful forever and don’t immediately scream “I got this idea from someone else!”. It is, of course, worth remembering that your choice of wedding dress should reflect your own desires, and make you look and feel great. And maybe that perfect dress for you does happen to be exactly what’s trendy at the moment. Basically, be careful about choosing wedding attire just because it’s trendy – but take care not to shun something you really like just because it’s trendy!
1950s Vintage style Pearl Chandelier Earrings
Accessorizing
When we talk about accessorizing for a wedding, we’re generally talking about jewelry. Here’s something that’s important to remember: it’s possible to get more than one use of out the jewelry you choose, which is something you probably can’t say about your wedding dress! So this shouldn’t just be a case of making sure you find something that matches with your dress perfectly. You should consider picking out jewelry that you’d actually want to use for other occasions!
To some, this may imply that you should be willing to spend an awful lot of money to ensure you get something that’s beautiful, flexible, and long-lasting. Yes, you should aim for jewelry that is all three of those things, but they needn’t be too expensive. You can, for example, find wholesale diamonds for sale that will do the trick. Otherwise, you may want to consider simply renting jewelry for your wedding day. Heck, even a high-quality replica will probably do! At the end of the day, just ensure that your choice doesn’t clash with your dress and that you’re happy with it.
Avoid audiences
Think about all the wedding movies you’ve seen, and all the television shows that have featured weddings. In most of these there will have been a scene in which the bride-to-be is picking her wedding dress – and has brought approximately a bajillion friends with her. There are a lot of reasons why someone may do this: they don’t want any of their friends being left out, and they also want to get as many opinions as possible.
Here’s the problem with that: you’re just going to end up in the middle of a cross-fire of opinions! The more people you have with you, the more pressure you’re going to feel. It may ultimately be harder to pick out a dress. You should really only have one or two friends with you, at most. Don’t follow the example Hollywood sets – those scenes are there to create dramatic dialogue, which isn’t necessarily helpful in real life!
I (hair)do
When your attire has been decided, it’s worth giving some thought to how you’re going to wear your hair on the day. Fortunately for you, there’s already an in-depth guide to wedding day hairdos on this very blog!
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