Bad Bridesmaid

by Siri Agrell

  “I was trying to do it in a somewhat discreet way,” she said.

  “Crushing them up as small as I could in my hands so no one would see what I was doing and be like, ‘Why is she stealing the flowers out of the arrangements before the ceremony?”

  Unfortunately, it’s tough to be discreet in head-to-toe tulle.

  Completely Teed Off

  Most bridesmaids do their best to obey the commands of their Bridal Leader and accommodate last-minute disasters involving flowers or fashion, while silently counting down the days until it will all be over. Still, listening to nonstop wedding talk for a year of your life can take its toll on even the most dedicated bridesmaid.

  This was sort of how I was feeling when I saw a tank top for sale on Going Bridal, a Web site that pokes fun at the over-the top demands of modern brides. I thought it was hilarious and adequately apropos of the last few months of my life. The site sells cards that read, “Thank you for the completely inadequate wedding present” and Greedy Bride T-shirts that show a woman in an elaborate gown and veil clutching a large wad of cash in one manicured fist. The shirt I picked out was white, with a photo of a bride framed by a red circle and slashed through with a single diagonal line. Beneath the image are the words PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR FUCKING WEDDING.

  When my article about being a Bad Bridesmaid was published, it ran with a close-up photograph of my chest clad in the shirt, with a bouquet of flowers in my hands strategically arranged so that a single petal blocked the obscene word from view.

  I have since realized that donning such a garment around a prospective bride is a form of bridesmaid hara-kiri, like wearing a shirt that says, THAT MAKES YOUR ASS LOOK BIG while working retail, or busting out your HIGH MAINTENANCE tee on a first date. It just won’t go over well.

  The founder of Going Bridal is not the only person who has been inspired to create a 100-percent-cotton-blend protest to pre-wedding obligations. Olivia T. was thirty years old when a woman she had known since childhood asked her to be in her wedding party. They’d met when they were eight and had been close growing up, but twenty-two years later they saw each other only about once a year. Soon after her friend’s engagement, though, Olivia and five other bridesmaids were meeting on a monthly basis to discuss every element of the wedding, shop for dresses, and receive updates on the Farmers’ Almanac— projected weather forecast for the wedding day.

  For more than a year, Olivia attended parties once a month, arriving at each with a strictly assigned gift: for the lingerie shower ($50), the Home Depot shower ($75), and even a wine shower ($40), where the guests dozed while the engaged couple read out the name of each bottle, the year it was produced, and who it was from.

  “It was like, ‘Masi, 1999, Mike and Kathy Smith; Penfolds Estate, 2001, Debby and Matthew Reynolds; Twin Fin, 2006, Hank and Betty Jackson,’” Olivia said. “And then they’d grab the next bottle of wine. It was brutal.”

  In between the regularly scheduled events, the bridesmaids also had to meet to go over flower arrangements, bouquets, finger foods, and who would officiate the ceremony. For an unknown reason, these details could not be discussed via e-mail or on the phone—which would at least have allowed the bridesmaids to roll their eyes or watch TV while being gradually bored to death. No, this bride wanted her planning intimate and interactive. At one meeting, the women gathered for a two-hour powwow over whether the necklines on their bridesmaid dresses should sit just below the collarbone or just above. Each bridesmaid had to take turns sharing her opinion as The Bride took notes and the relative merits of conservatism and décolletage were discussed.

  “I remember thinking it was the stupidest conversation I’d ever been a part of in my whole life,” Olivia said.

  By the time the engagement period was over, she and the other bridesmaids had spent thousands of dollars on gifts, lunches, lattes, and decorations, and most of them had given up entirely on being helpful or cooperative. They were sick of The Bride, the groom, and each other, having spent more time boring one another to tears than the cast of Everybody Loves Raymond.

  At the wedding reception, Olivia said the bridesmaids were itching for escape, eager to be finished with the year-long endeavor. Little did they know that they would soon have a lasting memento of their 365-day sacrifice. In front of three hundred wedding guests at the formal black-tie function, a groomsman took the microphone and made a toast to the bridesmaids. He paid tribute to how well they had all gotten to know one another, a product, he noted, of twelve months of forced get-togethers and mandated social interaction. And to illustrate his point, he presented each bridesmaid with a T-shirt that read, I SURVIVED THE LINDA-STEVE WEDDING TOUR.

  The T-shirts were modeled after the concert tees sold at every live rock show from the Rolling Stones to the Pussycat Dolls. On the front, photos of the bride and groom grinned out at the guests like deranged teen idols, and on the back were listed the dates, venues, and themes of every wedding-related meeting, shower, and engagement bash the bridesmaids had been forced to attend.

  Across the rundown of events were stamped the words SOLD OUT in bright red letters. The neckline sat just above the collarbone, as discussed.

  Sea Foam Blues

  It’s a bridesmaid’s dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day. Then, tossed it … like a Christmas tree. So special, then bam—it’s on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it, like a sex crime victim, underwear inside out, bound with electrical tape.

  Maria Singer, Fight Club

  I didn’t want to come out of the change room.

  It was springtime and we were shopping for the bridesmaid dresses that I and three other girls would wear down the aisle in July. The outing had started out like any other weekend shopping trip with friends. It was a gorgeous, brisk but sunny Saturday morning, and The Bride, another bridesmaid, and I strolled through a trendy shopping district laughing at people’s outfits and chatting about where we would stop for lunch. The sidewalks were crammed with street vendors, hotdog salesmen, and women jumping the gun on summer, barelegged under their flirty skirts, despite the chilly breeze. Music blared from outdoor speakers and we ducked in and out of stores if something pretty caught our eye. We were not, however, the only female shoppers on the strip, and our bubble of bridal bliss would soon be burst. As we were planning our best friend’s wedding, the city was abuzz with a different sort of major event planning. It was high school prom time, and the malls were teeming with teenage Lolitas, strutting around in size-zero jeans and taunting us with their tiny frames.

  Psychologically, I wasn’t ready to hunt for dresses alongside 300 ninety-pound debutantes. I didn’t want to hear them talk about how their minuscule asses looked fat or be forced to contemplate how many years had gone by since my own high school graduation, when I regrettably wore a dress I had made myself and hemmed with purple feathers.

  Physically, I was equally unprepared for the task at hand. It was still cool enough outside to require socks, and I had wisely selected a dark pair that were sure to look fantastic when worn with my Hush Puppies and a strapless peach cocktail dress. It should also be noted that underwear has never been my thing, and I had convinced myself that going commando while dress shopping was an acceptable way to avoid having my pantyline pointed out by a stick-thin saleswoman who probably ironed her thong before putting it on. And so I found myself clad in a cheap, off-white gauzy number that I had managed to zip up over my pasty white back, my private areas fully visible through the translucent material, my socks and shoes doing little to heighten the outfit’s already minimal appeal, wondering how I could avoid showing it to my friends.

  The small curtained dressing room stall in which I stood did not even provide me with a mirror, let alone a window through which to escape, so I emerged with only a vague idea of the disaster that awaited me. Outside, I was confronted by my startlingly unglam-orous reflection in the full-length mirror, the store’s fluorescent lights making matters worse with their sickly strobe-light
flickering. It would have been less painful for everyone involved had I just walked out buck naked. At least then I might have gotten a laugh.

  As I had feared, the sheets of gauzy organza were not successful in creating an opaque layer, and the dress was as transparent as the look of disgust on the faces of my fellow shoppers. My body, in all its post-winter, pre-diet glory, was hidden by only a fine mist of poorly assembled fabric and the length of my two black tube socks. Across the store, a sixteen-year-old emerged from another change room wearing the exact same dress, with a pink slip underneath and high heels on her pedicured feet, her perfectly toned frame a cruel reminder of how my own body had looked before I was introduced to beer, Beaujolais, and Brie. She was my polar opposite reflected back at me. And I swear I saw her smirk.

  Putting up a Stink

  How a woman looks in a bridesmaid dress can sometimes be secondary to how it makes her feel. Wedding attendants are asked to cheerfully contend with cheap material, unforgiving seams, and boning that threatens to puncture a lung if you inhale too deeply or turn sharply to your right.

  Aynsley F., an eight-timer, was made to wear a formal suit constructed from fabric she suspected had been torn from a couch. It was one of the ugliest dresses I’d ever seen in my life,” she said. “It was taffeta but it looked like upholstery. It was a mauve skirt and a jacket and there was a ruffle over the butt.”

  To make matters worse, she was participating in an August wedding that took place in an old, un-air-conditioned church in the heart of the Deep South. “It was a long Catholic wedding in Spanish and English—twice as long because they had to do it in both languages,” Aynsley remembered.

  The bridesmaids wore shoes that were so cheap they began to disintegrate at the first sign of sweat. By the end of the service, they’d each lost a dress size in perspiration—their Tammy Bakker mascara streaming down their cheeks, the ruffles on their butts sagging with the weight of absorbed water, and their former kitten heels compressed into flats. They had been reduced to a lineup of deflated, soaking wet women who looked as though they had just worked an eight-hour secretarial shift inside a sauna.

  It must be awful to stand through a summer wedding draped in the skin of an old couch, but imagine what it would be like to attend a wedding in a bridesmaid dress that has already been worn and drenched in sweat.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Erica P. was in a wedding where the bridesmaids’ dresses were hand-me-downs from the nuptials of one of The Bride’s relatives. “The dress I had to wear had been previously worn by someone with the most horrific body odor,” said the three-time attendant. The Bride promised she would have the dress dry-cleaned and told Erica not to worry, the only scents permeating her wedding day would be those of fresh flowers and her own desperation to finally tie the knot.

  When the dress came back, Erica pulled it out of the plastic bag and got a noseful of BO. “It was too strong for even the cleaners to get out!” she said. Throughout the wedding, the bridesmaid trailed a cloud of stink around with her dress—down the aisle and back, into the reception, and even during the group and family photos, when she had to sit on the knee of one of the groomsmen, the armpit of her dress dangerously close to his nose.

  “I had to apologize for the smell of this dress I’m wearing,” she said. “And of course, how many of them do you think believed that the dress smelled BEFORE I put it on?”

  Pretty Awful in Pink

  A few women may have to wear secondhand bridesmaid dresses, but it is a rule of modern society that no one ever wears a bridesmaid dress twice, no matter how many times they are assured of its timelessness, comfort, and durability.

  Every bride tries to convince her bridesmaids that their dresses will be stunning couture worthy of a future red carpet or black-tie ball. Because of this lie, women who swear by designer labels, fashion-forward thinking, and black, black, black suddenly find themselves decked out in cheap knockoff strapless numbers in a shade of putrid purple. Almost every woman has one of these dresses in her closet, tucked away in the section reserved for things that are never worn but were too expensive to throw out, like that designer poncho that seemed like such a good idea or the three-hundrcd-dollar skinny jeans that you were too fat to wear after a four-dollar McDonald’s meal. And when it comes to their bridesmaid dresses—like a lot of painful experiences masquerading as important milestones—women tend to remember their first time.

  “The Bride first let us know that she wanted us in pink by sending an e-mail,” said Madeline J., by now a five-time bridesmaid.This kind of message is among the scariest things that can happen to a woman via computer, second only to the terrifying moment when you accidentally click on a pop-up window at work and find your monitor filled with multiplying images of hard-core pornography. Rather than let the bride’s demand spiral similarly out of control, Madeline and her fellow bridesmaids wrote her back, each crafting carefully worded responses that said they supported her decision but implied that they were worried about its color-coordinated consequences.

  “Well, it’s your wedding, but be aware that because of my skin tone, many shades of pink make me look like I’m not wearing anything,” Madeline wrote in her own reply. “Not that I mind that particularly, but it is after all your day and the attention should be focused on you.”

  Psychological double-talk of this manner is the only acceptable weapon against a butt-ugly bridesmaid dress. Brides are known to respond to unfiltered opinion as if you’ve asked them to let the groom’s ex-girlfriend jump out of a cake at his bachelor party. Words such as hideously ugly must be replaced with potentially inappropriate, and the phrase “I’d rather die than put that on my body” substituted with “Don’t you think it might clash with your flowers?” This sort of dubious dishonesty is not usually perfected until the later stages of motherhood, when women must convince their children that they are being punished for their own good.

  As it happened, this bride stuck by her choice, secure in the knowledge that it did not even come close to the color of a pale girl’s skin. Madeline should have been so lucky.

  “It was so pink. It was not even fuchsia. Not pale pink. It was fluorescent highlighter pink,” she said, still awed by the dress’snuclear capabilities years after she wore it. “It was its own light source.” The dress was also floor-length, A-line, shiny satin and multiplied six times, making the bridesmaids look like Dolly Parton’s backup singers, circa 1982.

  Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more humiliating for these poor pink bridal attendants, Madeline delivered the kicker: “She made us skip into the wedding reception.”

  More than a wearable wedding accessory, the bridesmaid dress has developed into a modern tool of female ritual humiliation. One suspects that there is a global conspiracy afoot to persuade women to dress up like idiots and bound down an aisle—a way to turn us against each other so we can never unite toward the goal of total world domination.

  Sometimes technology has a hand in this process, complicating—or completely crashing—a wedding program already fraught with peril. Two-time bridesmaid Grace L. was in a wedding where The Bride ordered her attendants’ dresses from an Internet boutique. Most bridal parties will consider this option, clicking through page after page of calf-length strapless gowns modeled by girls who would never actually be caught dead in them in public. Online, a lot of outfits look nice, but then again, a lot of people who post dating profiles on the Internet seem normal until you get back to their apartment and find a collection of rubber bondage masks hanging on the mantel. The dress Grace and her fellow bridesmaids were to wear looked pretty good on the computer screen, a strapless, empire-waisted gown in a bold color that was just modern enough without being gaudy.

  “It was hot pink, which I thought could have been pretty cool,” Grace said.

  When the dresses were delivered, the women realized that they’d been duped, as if their Russian mail-order bride had turned up and told them she was only in it for the green card.

 
; The outfits were as badly constructed as Scott Peterson’s alibi, the seams framing every inch of their tummies and highlighting all their fleshy flaws. The top was not boned, so it hung dangerously loose, threatening to collapse at the faintest provocation. And instead of being one hot pink dress, the outfit was constructed from two layers of fabric: a white sliplike foundation topped by a see-through organza overlay in bright, blinding fuchsia. Like an out-of-control science project, the fusion of the two materials created a color that was not so much hot pink as discarded Bubblicious.

  “We looked like wads of gum,” Grace sighed.

  Brown Bunnies and Shrimpy Eighties Prom. Queens

  Until the nineteenth century, it would have been unheard of for a bridesmaid to wear pink—bubblegum or otherwise. Before then, bridal attendants were dressed head to toe in white, designed as clones of the bride, to distract evil spirits or jealous ex-suitors.

  When the threat of wedding-day abductions and evil curses subsided in the Western world, brides were no longer content to let their friends steal their thunder by wearing outfits similar to their own. White was phased out to satisfy brides’ growing desire to be the center of attention, and bridesmaids were dressed instead in coordinated hues of pale blue, pink, lilac, or green, like a collection of animated Easter M&Ms.

  Forgetting that the bridal attendant role had been created to save their pretty little asses from being kidnapped or cursed,brides soon started making other additions to ensure that their bridesmaids looked nowhere near as good as they did, beginning a trend that has lasted to this day.