Bridesmaid Dresses!

Hey everyone,

My sister and I came to a quick decision once she tried on the right dress. We have decided to go with Alfred Sung dresses, made by the Dessy Group. Each bridesmaid gets to choose between the following 8 dresses, in peau de soie fabric (which I have found is just a fancy name for duchess satin). The color will be daffodil.



The store we went to, Demetrios (located in Troy, MI), offered us a 15% discount if we ordered all the dresses through them, even though each bridesmaid will order a different dress. This is pretty common but not necessarily a given--I called Konja's Bridal in Berkley, MI, which also carries the Alfred Sung line, and they only offer a volume discount on dresses over $200 (which these are not). The annoying thing about Demetrios--and I should have watched out for this--was that Kaleen, the saleslady, said she could only hold the discount open for five days--I had to pay for my sister's dress in order to reserve the discount for everyone else.

Here are the prices we got, for your reference:

Style # D434--originally $175, with 15% off is $148.75
Style # D435--originally $180, with 15% off is $153.00
Style # D436--originally $180, with 15% off is $153.00
Style # D437--originally $185, with 15% off is $157.25
Style # D438--originally $185, with 15% off is $157.25
Style # D439--originally $185, with 15% off is $157.25
Style # D440--originally $190, with 15% off is $161.50
Style # D441--originally $190, with 15% off is $161.50

Feedback from my ladies has been pretty positive, although one has mentioned that she had to make appointments at five stores to try on all the dresses, which I didn't anticipate. Hopefully the benefits of having so many choices outweigh the disadvantages.

More Bridal Shop Reviews

1. Bella Bridal. Date: March 13, 2010. Shopping for: wedding gowns. Location: West Bloomfield, MI.
Wonderful store. The staff was so nice and patient, particularly Sonia and Ellen. I wanted to buy my dress there just because I liked them so much.
But I was disappointed with the trunk show. There wasn't anything to it: they just had an extra rack of dresses, ostensibly from Mon Cheri's latest line. But they didn't even have all of the gowns in the Spring 2010 collection--the one Mon Cheri uses in a lot of advertisements that I've seen, Keegan, wasn't even there. In any event, I didn't find the dress of my dreams (although I think my grandma did).

2. The Wedding Shoppe. Date: March 13, 2010. Shopping for: wedding gowns. Location: Berkley, MI.
This is a nice store. It's a little crowded, and the seamstress had to fill in for my designated consultant for a while because it was so busy, but I did get attention. I found at least four gorgeous dresses. I can't show you, because, according to the consultant, The Wedding Shoppe only uses private collections, so none of them are advertised publicly "because the designers want to spend their money focusing on quality." I know, it sounds like baloney. I did ask the consultant for the designers' names, and the designers do have websites, but the particular dresses aren't on there. Hopefully they're not scamming customers by tricking them into believing their buying a designer dress when they aren't. Next time I will ask for the specific name of the style. It's possible that the designers really do have "private collections" or, as my friend Andrea pointed out to me, those particular styles are just old.
In any event, I loved their selection, and their dresses make up my top two. And readers, I give you fair warning...I may have been wrong about the whole strapless dress thing...but I suppose it's good to admit when you were wrong, right? But let's just say I may end up with the plainest, most-bridal bridal gown of all time...and I might love it. More on that when a purchase is made, I'm going to wait for Bridal Fashion Week this April to see if anything better catches my eye.

Several Bridal Shop Reviews

I forgot that part of why we started this blog was to review the wedding planning experience! So here are a few shops I've been to recently:

1. Demetrios. Date: early January 2010. Shopping for: wedding gowns. Location: Troy, MI (although they have several other stores around the country)
Demetrios was not too bad. The staff was very attentive, and great at suggesting gowns that I didn't think I'd like, but turned out to be great. I would go again if they had had THE dress, but for the most part my mom and I found Demetrios dresses to be too gaudy, particularly for a summer wedding.

2. Alan Ray Bridal. Date: January 30, 2010. Shopping for: wedding gowns. Location: Columbus, OH.
Very good store, the saleslady was very patient with me, and very attentive. She also let me and Theresa roam the store to pick out whatever we wanted for me to try on. They didn't have a huge selection, but Theresa and I did like the gowns they had, particularly the Maggie Sottero ones (I don't think it's just me--Maggie Sottero makes great gowns that seem to make every girl happy). They take very good care of their store--you are asked to take your shoes off when you enter the bridal salon.

3. Aria Bridesmaid Try-On Program. Date: March 6, 2010. Shopping for: bridesmaid dresses. Location: Lititz, PA (but it could be anywhere--read on an I'll explain).
This is a great program. Aria only has retail stores in DC, Boston, and LA. Since it is difficult for some to get out there to try on their beautiful, well-made gowns, Aria has a program where they send a potential customer dresses to try on at $15 each. You get to keep the dress for a few days and then you have to mail it back. Andrea ordered a bigger size so all of the bridesmaids would fit in it (so we didn't have to order two dresses for each girl), and we used potato chip bag clips to hold the smaller girls in. Unfortunately, neither style that we tried on was well-loved, but it's good to know that this program is out there.

4. Enchanted Evening. Date: March 6, 2010. Shopping for: bridesmaid dresses. Location: Lebanon, PA.
Great store! They are very careful with their merchandise; for example, I was not allowed to hold the gown until I had to put it on--the saleslady held it outside the dressing room and then passed it to me through the curtain once I was undressed. This makes sense--as the saleslady explained, when many people try on a dress, it can get snagged or ripped.
Additionally, Enchanted Evening offered a 20% discount if 5 or more bridesmaids ordered from them! On a $200 dress, that's a lot! (For those of you who are interested, Andrea ended up choosing this dress from Avalon Bridal for her bridesmaids, which we really do all love. It will be in dark red, with the sash being the same color).

5. Alfred Angelo. Date: March 6, 2010. Shopping for: wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses. Location: Lancaster, PA (although Alfred Angelo has several stores around the country).
I wish I had more good things to say about this store. My appointment started almost a half hour late (admittedly, it was a Saturday, and I understand they were busy) and the sales lady was particularly pushy. She kept pushing me to name one dress "THE dress", when, to be honest, none of them were even close. The wedding gowns felt cheaply made; none of them felt right.
The bridesmaid dresses were not too bad, though. No sales lady was needed for my girls to try them on, so I think they had fun, and we found some good dresses. Although--another demerit for our saleslady--we asked her what fabric one dress was made of, and she said chiffon. We didn't believe her, so we looked it up in the catalog, and it was crepe (good job Kristy, sticking to your guns!).
So overall, the Alfred Angelo store did not leave a great impression on me. I liked their bridesmaid dresses,* but their wedding gowns and salespeople were below par.

That's all for now, but there's more to come! I'm headed to the Mon Cheri Trunk Show at Bella Bridal this weekend in West Bloomfield, MI and then I have an appointment at The Wedding Shoppe in Berkley, MI. I'm having so much fun planning this wedding (and helping in all my friends' weddings), and I hope you all enjoy reading the blog and following along.


*I may still end up with Alfred Angelo dresses for my bridesmaids--my sister likes their designs, but she is in Argentina on study abroad right now, and I don't want to make any decisions until she can try something on.

It fits!

I picked up my dress from David's Bridal last week, on schedule (about 6 weeks after I dropped it off)--it fits perfectly! Theresa's wedding is August 1st--two and a half months away.

Daisy's Day at David's Bridal Alterations

One of the reasons Lily and I thought we'd start this blog is because we are just at that age where all our friends are starting to get married. Our first wave of weddings starts this summer, and dutiful girlfriends that we are, we've been called up on to be bridesmaids, so we think we have a unique insight into wedding planning, and an up-close opportunity to compare and contrast what like about what we see.

This August, I'm in my good friend Theresa's wedding, and I'm wearing style 81509 from David's Bridal, in the color Lapis (shown on the right). It definitely complements Theresa's gown, style CRL277, but I'll confess I was nervous when I saw what she had chosen. I have not had a lot of luck with empire waist dresses, because I am what they call "top heavy." I went to the shop last October to get fitted and order the dress, and let me first note that one of the key advantages to DB is that they have stores everywhere. Theresa's registered in Toledo, but we tried on dresses while we were both in Indiana, and I ordered the dress in Okemos, Michigan, near where I live.

Unfortunately, neither the Indiana store nor the Michigan store carried that specific style in my size, size 12! I was very upset, because I was very if-fy on this style of dress, and no one wants to spend $130 blindly. I tried on a 14 and it hung on me, but the 10 was just a little too tight. So I had to order the size 12 without trying it on, something I really wish I didn't have to do.

The dress came in in December, and this week I went in for my alterations, because, while the dress fits the top half of me well, the skirt of the dress is this sort of mermaid-trumpet style. It's supposed to hug the hips, but my hips just don't fill it out. But once Patty, the alterations specialist at the shop pinned the dress to the right size for me, boy, did I feel better! It looked great! I can't wait to see how it turns out: I'm scheduled to pick it up May 6th.

All in all, the dress was $135, but I got $20 off because Theresa bought her gown at David's Bridal too. The alterations cost a total of $65, and that was to 1.) tighten the spaghetti straps, 2.) take in the skirt and 3.) hem the skirt.

A note on the hem: this dress has a train, which I didn't find out until I went in for the alterations fitting. Patty asked whether the bride wanted me to leave the train when I got the dress hemmed, and I couldn't get a hold of Theresa right then. So Patty pinned the dress as if we were taking the train off, and told me to call her within a few days once I got a hold of Theresa. We ended up leaving the train, figuring that not all the bridesmaids would need a hem anyway, so why make them pay more when they didn't have to. So I want to thank David's Bridal in Okemos, Michigan, and Patty, for their flexibility in this; it really made my life a lot easier. Additionally, hemming the skirt and leaving the train cost the same as hemming the skirt and cutting the train off.