Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  I was expecting the day to be like the Anne Hathaway smash hit (read: critically panned) film and required girl viewing Bride Wars, minus the wars. Champagne for showing up, empty stores except for my family and me, the general feeling that I was acting in my own real-life rom-com. I soon learned that’s not what wedding dress shopping is like at all.

  At the first store we went to, Gabriella in SoHo, I insisted on trying on supersimple things only.

  “I want something like what Kate Moss had,” I informed the saleswoman.

  She proceeded to guide me through the racks, pulling out dresses she thought might suit me, explaining that patrons were not allowed to pick things up themselves. When you’re looking for a wedding dress, you’re not allowed to pull things out yourself because when you walk into a wedding store, the assumption goes, grown women lose all ability to pick up clothes and hold them without soiling them, dropping them, or ripping them. And so every interaction with a wedding dress is supervised carefully, like you’re picking up prescription drugs in prison. I think this is because the dresses are expensive as all hell and the stores keep only one or two in stock at a time for people to try on, so they don’t want to take any chance of a brash bride staining one of them. But really, talk about a way to make grown women feel infantile. After all, anyone can walk into Saks and throw on a $2,000 Stella ­McCartney blazer hanging on the rack like it ain’t no thing.

  “Do you like lace?” she asked as she pulled things out.

  “I guess a little would be fine,” I said. “But I’m not looking for the Kate Middleton value meal here.”

  When I had enough things to try on, the saleswoman came into the fitting room with me. She watched me take off my clothes while she asked about my life.

  “So what do you do?”

  I was in my bra and skinny jeans.

  “I work in media.”

  I hopped on one leg and tugged at my pants. There is no good way to take off Jegging-ish pants in front of another person.

  She held the first dress while I was down to my underwear and socks.

  “At a magazine?”

  “Yeah, I work at Cosmo.”

  I was now topless, sockless, and wearing a thong. I tried to angle my butt away from the mirror. If they had given me the champagne I’d expected, this part would be fine.

  This is a special moment, trying on your first wedding dress, one that society has taught me should end with a group of women crying. Mothers especially are supposed to cry, either because they’re overcome by emotion or because they’re paying and it’s just sinking in how much this is going to cost.

  Am I supposed to cry? I thought as the woman buttoned me in and sent me out into the salon. I just knew if my mom cried, I would cry, too.

  I left the dressing room and strode toward the mirror. Instead of bawling, my mother said, “That looks like a nightgown.” My sister burst out laughing.

  Did you know you can get married in a nightgown? In a bridal store, they slap a $3,500 price tag on it anyway because this isn’t only fashion: it’s wedding fashion. They can charge you something insane because they know you’re never planning on doing this again. They’re basically silk nothings that you can tie an $800 belt around if you don’t want to look like you woke up like this. In my effort to avoid picking up anything that was bridal in a bad way, I had selected only nightgowns. Well, I no longer dressed like a seventh grader, but perhaps I wasn’t as good at styling myself as I thought.

  The saleswoman went into damage control mode. “How about something with a little more to it?” she said, pulling out a dress with an A-line skirt, empire waist, and sweetheart neckline. I agreed to try it on.

  My mother was pleased with this A-line number because it didn’t look like a nightgown. But I like all my clothes fitted, and treated the fabric flowing out from my waist like shackles.

  “Ugh, I can’t move in this,” I said as I lumbered across the floor with a scowl on my face. Meanwhile, next to me, a woman was trying on an obscenely expensive Jenny Packham dress (you know Jenny Packham; she makes some of Kate Middleton’s evening clothes) with so much embellishment she looked like a chandelier. While I admire a girl who sees head-to-toe sparkle and thinks, “ME!” this woman would have looked better—or at the least, just like a human woman—in 90 percent of the other things in the store.

  My sister and I looked at each other with widened eyes. Just because something costs $8,000 doesn’t mean it looks like $8,000. Anyone who’s watched Bravo knows this. As does anyone who’s ever walked into a store, seen something nice, looked at the price tag, and thought, WTF are they serious?

  Since my mom kept turning up her nose at the nightgowns, which I actually kind of liked, I browsed through a rack of Marchesa dresses (without picking them up and carrying them anywhere myself, so as not to break the bridal law about not handling gowns). I knew Marchesa well from going to its Fashion Week shows and red carpet photos of Blake Lively. The stuff is sparkly and lovely and expensive-looking and stylish—this isn’t scary fashion; this is the stuff women who live in Dallas and San Diego want to wear when they have a black-tie event. One dress had embellished cap sleeves. But all I could see when I looked at them was the human chandelier next to me. My sister failed to get excited about any of them. My mom kept repeating to anyone who would listen, “She can wear anything.”

  I put on my favorite nightgown once more before leaving the store. My mom made a face. “I don’t see the big deal,” she said. “She can wear anything.” She held her palms up.

  I left the store stressed.

  “I hate everything,” I told my family. “I’m not going to find anything at all.”

  “We went to one store,” my mom said. “Just calm down.”

  “Everything is hideous,” I insisted. “There’s no way I’ll find anything I like.”

  The average bride spends upward of $1,200 on a dress, according to the Wedding Report, which aggregates wedding statistics for US markets. This leads to roughly more than $2.5 billion in sales in dresses a year. For many women—myself included—a wedding dress is the most you’ll spend on a piece of clothing over the course of your life. Sometimes we have to settle with our wardrobes, like when you have a job interview and no time to find the perfect outfit. But part of the reason you plan a wedding for a whole year is so that it is not one of those times. The longer you plan something, the more you want it to be perfect. Because your wedding photos are not going anywhere for a long time. They’ll be on your mantel until you die and then they’ll be on your kids’ dressers, so it’s, like, kind of important not to fuck it up.

  • • •

  Next was not another bridal appointment but a work appointment. I had to meet Chelsea Handler at the Four Seasons to interview her for Paper magazine about her latest book of travel stories. I had read all her books and was a huge fan because she’s hilarious and clearly does not give a fuck what anyone thinks, which is what I aspire to as an anxious, self-conscious person. There was no way I was missing face time with her, even for the most important dress of my life. I had been waiting to schedule the interview for weeks, and you don’t exactly get to choose the time that best suits your schedule when you’re interviewing a hugely famous person. I sent my mom and sister off to find their own food, and went to the Four Seasons, where Chelsea arrived right on time at noon wearing what looked like workout clothes, accompanied by two large dogs. I had seen her host Paper’s nightlife awards the night before, and she had her hair in the same pigtail French braids. She had somehow managed to run seven miles in Central Park that morning. I knew we’d get along as soon as we sat down and she placed our drink order.

  “Two margaritas,” she informed the waiter as we took a seat at a back table, her dogs on the floor beside us.

  “With salt,” I added.

  We were off to a great start. “We stay in places based on how they make a mar
garita. I call ahead and have my assistant talk to them,” Chelsea said. “I’m seriously on the border of turning into Jennifer Lopez. That’s what I think of myself.”

  In my experience, comedians are usually funnier in person than they are on TV. Chelsea proved my point. I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day, so the margarita went to my head instantly, which is exactly how I like to spend Friday afternoons when I’m not in the office.

  “Two years ago, I went with six of my girlfriends, or six of us in total, and we went to Africa for two weeks’ time because I just decided, I’m like, ‘You know what? We need to go to Africa!’ So six of us went, and we went to Botswana and then to this elephant camp—it’s lame, that was one of the lamest parts,” she said. “I have never drunk more in my entire life than on that safari, because you are sitting in that car all day long. Not only are you not getting exercise, you are not even walking. You are literally just drinking. You can’t get out [because of the animals].”

  The waiter came over to take our order. Chelsea asked me what I wanted. I chose a chicken salad and she got the same.

  “And another round,” she told the waiter. I was drunk. And it was good.

  Chelsea took out some pages from the book. “This is me peeing off a boat, in Botswana peeing off a Jeep, my sister and my cousin peeing, Sue peeing.” She laughed. “It was crazy.”

  What was happening right now was crazy. I took a break from wedding dress shopping to eat lunch with Chelsea Handler at the Four Seasons, get drunk on margaritas that had been vetted by her assistant, and talk to her about books and being funny. What is my life?

  Nearly eight years ago, I was getting fired from a job I hated that didn’t pay a livable wage, begging for $50 freelance assignments that involved accosting celebrities to ask them embarrassing things, and saving up for $13.99 rayon cowl-neck tops from sketchy clothing stores that blast techno music and look like covers for illegal drug trafficking. Turns out, enough late nights combined with thinking you’re a failure while desperately hoping to turn out the opposite can propel you to a place where you’re either getting paid to write about peeing off boats in Africa or to a place where you’re getting paid to drink with the woman who did. Chelsea Handler, everyone.

  “Life has become so ridiculous because I have access to such nonsense, and I can go to these places,” Chelsea continued. “I’ve become so infantilized by having so many assistants: people who take care of you and pack you and dress you—it just never stops.”

  That’s the difference between celebrities who wear high fashion and normal people—even brides—who do. When a celebrity needs to pick out an all-important dress or outfit—for a magazine cover or Ralph Lauren fashion show in a park or Metropolitan Museum of Art gala—her options are whittled down by people with impeccable taste. They have access to the best clothing, shoes, and accessories and bring it directly to her Four Seasons hotel room, or wherever she is. Celebrities don’t go store to store.

  Partway through our lunch, I told Chelsea I had taken a break from wedding dress shopping to meet her. She asked polite questions about my fiancé and the wedding, and the conversation turned to multiple marriages.

  “I don’t think people should be allowed to get married after two times,” she said. “Obviously, you are just not good at getting married, so just date! Why can’t you date?! Dating is the best part of a relationship. Just continue to date. For me, I would love to get engaged and not get married. I don’t want to have kids.”

  I lamented the dire state of the bridal industry, and she lamented the dire state of the fashion industry.

  “I went to the Met Gala like two years ago, and I was like, ‘Why am I here?’ ” she continued. You know she doesn’t give a fuck about fashion—and God bless her—because no female celebrity has the balls to tell a reporter on the record that the Met Gala sucks. (Gwyneth Paltrow once told Australian radio hosts it “sucked”—but also admitted she was drunk during the conversation.) “I have no idea what the theme was, nor did I care. I knew that I wore motorcycle boots under my Roland Mouret gown. I think it was a Roland ­Mouret. I wore motorcycle boots. Anna Wintour was like, ‘She cannot wear motorcycle boots.’ I’m like, ‘Well, then, I’ll wear them so I can guarantee never getting invited again.’ ”

  Chelsea is completely right, of course, and I knew firsthand based on the specific instruction that I not wear black to my interview with her. The Met Gala is an absurd cavalcade of famous people wearing things so fashionable that you can hardly conceive of them as anything but holiday window displays that occasionally resemble a dress. Working inside the industry, forgetting this is easy because fashion devotees treat attending the Met Gala like sitting on the front row, times 100 trillion. If there are negative-row fashion show seats, they’re Met Gala tickets.

  Three margaritas deep, I stumbled back onto Fifty-Seventh Street and started weaving my way down the sidewalk to the Monique Lhuillier boutique.

  “Jst finishd w Chelsee,” I texted my sister. “B there in a sex.”

  When I arrived at the store, I was in a much better mood than I had been when I left. “Sorry. I think I am late,” I said to the saleswoman. She looked busy.

  “You are, but you still have forty-five minutes. I can’t give you the full hour because it’s a trunk show and we’re booked solid.”

  Trunk show. A trunk show has zero things to do with trunks and instead is a fancy way of saying, you get 15 percent off on anything you buy that day.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “I just want something,” I said as we climbed a beautiful staircase to the dresses on the second floor, “sssimple.”

  She proceeded to pull things from the racks. “You know the Kate Moss thing she wore,” I said. I turned to my mom and sister. “I had three margaritas.”

  My mother closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows.

  Most of the dresses here were strapless and lacy. I had a big room with its own pedestal for me to stand on and huge mirrors and girly moldings that made me feel like I was in my own private dollhouse. It was so big my mom and sister could sit in here with me, so I really had an audience for getting naked again. But three margs in, I didn’t even care if the door was closed.

  “Oh, I like this one,” I said when I put on a plain strapless ivory lace sheath dress with a little gold shimmer to it. “This is pretty.” Things were seemingly looking up. This lace, by some miracle, didn’t look like salt crusts.

  The saleswoman tied a sparkly belt around my waist. “You can wear it like this or you can wear it plain,” she said. I would learn during wedding dress shopping that every accessory you buy for a dress from a bridal designer often adds another $1,000. Even if it’s a piece of ribbon with some rhinestones on it or a piece of tulle with a comb attached to it (veil). Because bridal designers know that if you’ve ended up in a store with $12,000 gowns hanging on the racks, whether that’s your budget or not, you’ve probably grown up watching red carpet preshows and beauty pageants knowing that your only moment for similar glamour would be your wedding day, so you’ll suck it up and spend whatever you feel like you need to.

  Standing there, drunk, in this pretty lace dress, I could see it. I could see myself getting married in this. My mom and sister agreed it was pretty. Other brides in the store regarded me and told their salespeople they wanted to try it on, too. I felt like a sensation. Then again, you never know what’s truly happening around you when you’re drunk in the middle of the day.

  We wrote down the details of the lace dress and went to our next appointment at a store that bills itself as being for an “alternative bride,” which I won’t go into detail about except to say one of my fashion editor friends says, “It’s like Etsy threw up in there,” and I wouldn’t disagree with her.

  That evening we went out to dinner with my fiancé, where I ordered him to guess how I fared that day.

  “I’m gues
sing you didn’t find a dress,” he said.

  “I hated everything,” I said. “Bridal is terrible. I’ll have to marry you in a bed sheet and a belt. I’ll look like the Little Mermaid washed up without her fish tail.”

  “What? I thought you liked the Monique Lhuillier,” my sister said.

  “I don’t anymore. I hated everything,” I said.

  “You seemed like you liked it in the store. You were going on and on about how pretty that lace dress was.”

  “Well, I had just had some margaritas,” I said. “That’s why.”

  “I knew that would happen,” my mom said. “I knew she’d have lunch with Chelsea, get drunk, and then find something she likes. So much for that.”

  I had one more day to find a dress before my mom and sister left town. I obviously couldn’t do this without them. There’s a reason women have to bring their families to shop with them for a wedding dress, and that’s because their friends would never have the patience for it.

  The next morning, we rose early and went to fashion’s Upper East Side mecca: Bergdorf Goodman. I can’t say enough good things about the Bergdorf Goodman bridal salon. It’s like being inside of a cupcake. Every girly dream comes true in the Bergdorf Goodman bridal salon!

  “You only have an hour,” the saleswoman informed us. “No longer. We have appointments all day.”

  An hour sounds like a long time, but you could really spend three hours in there trying on everything. All the dresses are insanely gorgeous. I pulled at least fifteen from the racks for the first round.

  Suddenly everything seemed like a possibility. I was living out the montage in the Sex and the City movie where Sarah Jessica Parker tries on a million dresses for her Vogue bridal shoot, only the dresses were things people actually wear in real life as opposed to—fabulous though they were—dresses with sleeves made of queen-sized duvets.

  Boosting my ego (as though I needed it) was every salesperson in the store, who would compliment me every time I left my room.