Bad Bridesmaid

by Siri Agrell

  If you think you’ve got it bad, consider the poor bridesmaids of 150 years ago, who had to wear bonnets, or the women photographed in Jules Shwerin’s book In Wedding Styles: The Ultimate Bride’s Companion, who are clutching “fashionable shepherds crooks” in their white-knuckled hands. The motive for this Little Bo-Peep theme, one has to assume, was to make the dowdy bride look like an absolute fox by comparison.

  Considering that our historical foremothers were dressed like formal shepherds, modern bridesmaids have little to complain about in the form of tiered skirts, sweetheart necklines, plunging backs, or high collars, but there is still something about bridesmaid dresses for everyone to hate.

  “It was the tackiest red I’d ever seen in my life,” Sally N. said of the dress chosen for her friend’s wedding, a satin number with flounces. “It wasn’t like a really pretty deep red or any sort of classic red. It was Mexican whore red. And no offense to whores in Mexico, but it looked like it belonged in a bordello.”

  Another bridesmaid wore a dress that was described to her as the color of shrimp. “I imagined shit-filled veins and spindly legs,” said Pamela B. The dress was also so loose that when she first tried it on she could see straight down through the neckline to her feet. Ninety dollars in alterations later, the pale pink material had been cinched around her frame, and Pamela said she felt like an eighties prom queen: “a shrimpy eighties prom queen.”

  Bridesmaids who once admired the bride’s ability to recreate the pages of Vogue in her own daily wardrobe may be surprised when she instructs them to dress as extras in Stephen King’s Carrie or dancers in an ABBA reunion concert. But sadly, no number of bad reviews or desperate pleas from a bridesmaid is enough to shake loose the brides grip on her chosen gown.

  When Kate F., a thirty-one-year-old mother of two, was selected as a bridesmaid for her childhood friend, she told The Bride that the dress she had chosen was unflattering at best. “She didn’t seem to really care that none of us were going to look good,” said Kate. “She gracefully offered to pay for half of it, which was very kind. But she wanted us to have it that badly.”

  The dress in question also had an empire waist and flowed out from the bustline into a train at the back. From the chest down it was entirely formless, except for the puckering from the badly sewn seams, which created a rippled effect down the bridesmaids’ sides. “My stepmother-in-law, who’s a judge, was speechless,” Kate said. “How hard is it to leave a judge speechless?” Adding insult to injury, the dress was deep brown with a blue bow for trim. “At first I thought it made me look like a chocolate Easter bunny. But I didn’t even look that good.”

  Sometimes, shopping for a bridesmaid dress provides the first indication that two women who have felt so close in every other aspect of their lives have diametrically opposed ideas about style. One woman’s dream dress can be another’s knee-length nightmare with spaghetti straps. A few weeks after being named to a bridal party, successful fashion buyer Hilary M. received a phone call from her friend The Bride telling her the dresses had been found, and all she had to do was traipse on over to the store and pick hers up. As soon as she crossed over the threshold of the down-market clothing chain, Hilary knew she was in trouble.

  “Already I was panicking,” she said. “I looked at everything in the store and just knew I would never wear any of it.”

  Her own sporty-chic aesthetic was nowhere to be found among the racks of oh-so-over peasant blouses and shelves of bright pink shrugs. When she got to the counter, the saleswoman smiled supportively and handed her a two-piece dress constructed from iridescent green-blue taffeta, with a teeny-tiny tank and a full, billowy skirt.

  “The top is basically just a square of fabric at the front with a tie across the back,” Hilary said, shuddering at the memory. “It’s backless, so you can’t wear a bra. And anyone who knew me would know that they could not send me down an aisle without a bra.”

  She started to cry as soon as soon as the aqua monstrosity hit her body, and dialed The Bride from her cell phone inside the change room while trying to hold the outfit over her double-D boobs with her free hand.

  “I don’t think I can wear this,” she stammered through her tears, staring at her Little-Mermaid-turns-tricks reflection. Instead of asking her friend if she had lost her mind, or inquiring if the wedding was being filmed for an episode of Playboy’s Bridesmaids Gone Wild: Vegas Style, Hilary grasped for the first logical excuse to reject the dress that crossed her mind.

  The tattoo on her back would be visible in such a revealing gown, she reasoned, and guests might find it inappropriate. It should have been a foolproof rationale—visible tattoos are up there on most women’s lists of Wedding Don’ts, along with chili dog appetizers and Guns N’ Roses cover bands. Hilary had no idea what levels of inappropriateness The Bride could handle, but she was about to find out.

  “She said, ‘That’s okay, we’ll just cover it up with those stick-on jewel things,’” Hilary said, her voice still filled with disbelief. “That’s where I drew the line. I’ll walk down the aisle with my tits at my belly button, but you’re not gluing any glitter to my back.”

  Project Run Away

  Ready-to-wear gowns that don’t stink—literally or figuratively—can be hard to find for any individual, let alone for groups of women whose bodies are as different as their income levels and natural hair colors. So instead of searching for matching dresses they can buy off the rack, many bridal parties find themselves perusing pattern books to select their gowns. And in the hopes of tailoring a design to suit their own figures, they will subject themselves to the grizzled gaze and surprisingly strong grip of dressmakers who wrap tape measures around their bodies like tourniquets and produce, several months later, a loose approximation of the dress they had in mind.

  When Suzy F. and her fellow bridesmaids went for their fittings, the seamstress would break out the pins and start jabbing them with verbal abuse of her own design.

  “The dresses look better on the skinny girls,” she said to one.

  “Did you know your hips are not symmetrical,” she told another. “You should avoid low-rise pants.”

  “Good thing the shawl will cover up those broad shoulders,” she remarked to the third.

  At her last appointment, Suzy found that her dress was cut just a little snug. The seamstress sighed before conceding that she could let the garment out at the sides, a concept she presented like an act of martyrdom. Made to feel personally responsible for the dress’s lung-restricting dimensions, the bridesmaid took a deep breath and promised to lose weight. The dressmaker did not discourage her from fasting or apologize for making the dress one size too small; she simply nodded and barked, “Three to five pounds should do it.”

  With the bridesmaid’s fate and cash deposit in her calloused, dye-stained hands, the dressmaker can say anything she wants, but pity the woman who insults the dress—or the needlework—in return. Kirsty J. remembers arriving to be fitted for the dress she affectionately refers to as The Pink Sausage. “It had spaghetti straps like when you were a teenager and it was long and had slits up either side that basically went all the way up,” she said. “I’m not Catholic, but I did not feel comfortable walking through a church in this thing.”

  While Kirsty managed to keep her dismay to herself, her best friend, a bridesmaid in the same wedding, let her true feelings slip. She had gone in for a fitting by herself and was soon on the receiving end of the seamstress’s dissertation on the magic of marriage. On and on the woman talked as Kirsty’s friend was being pinned into her dress, asking if she was excited and if she agreed that weddings were, like, the most romantic things ever.

  Finally, the bridesmaid could take it no more.

  “She said, ‘You know, weddings aren’t really everybody’s idea of the ultimate fantasy, and I actually can’t believe I have to walk down the aisle in this thing,’” Kirsty recounted. The occupants of the bridal boutique froze as if the curtain had finally dropped, the Wizard of
Gauze visible for all to see, cranking up the hype on his fragile matrimonial kingdom. “Everyone turned around and just glared at her,” Kirsty said. “She ran back into the changing room and called me to come down and save her.”

  Having a bridesmaid dress custom-made is not necessarily torturous for every bridal party. It may be the sole opportunity for women to insert their own personality and flair, turning the dress-selection process into a competitive sport, an opportunity to outdo one another and even (uh-oh) the bride.

  Why add to your wardrobe a boring dress you’ll never wear again when you can add an outrageous backless, bias-cut dress you’ll never wear again?

  Jenny T. was in a wedding where each of the fourteen bridesmaids was given four yards of green fabric and told to design her own dress along with the help of a seamstress of her choice. “It was a competition,” she said. “It was unbelievable.”

  The Bride’s rules stated that the dress had to be floor-length and use the shinier side of the material, which was a glowing shade of seaweed no matter which way you turned it. The friends had attended a wedding the year before with a similar design edict, and one bridesmaid had reversed the fabric, producing a dress a shade lighter than everyone else’s. “She wanted to be different,” Jenny said. “Can you imagine? It just looked so stupid.”

  Jenny selected a pattern for a fitted dress with wide straps that sat just off the shoulder, and dropped her fabric and design off with a reasonably priced dressmaker, whose name she had found in the phone book. Three of the other bridesmaids, meanwhile, took the opportunity to create the dresses of their dreams. They hired designers who charged them a thousand dollars each to create custom-made gowns, with the women sketching out their fantasies and demanding their own little slice of haute cou ture. On the day of the wedding, the bridesmaids gathered for the “big reveal,” anxious to see who had created the ultimate in underling fashion.

  Some had their dresses intricately beaded and one girl’s was ruched from top to bottom, a dramatic pillar of sweeping lines. Two were outfitted with halter tops, one had a boat neck, and eight were strapless A-line dresses.

  When each girl walked in wearing her customized concoction, the other women would scream and gush over how much they loved her dress. And when she went into the other room for a coffee or a pee, they would whisper to each other how hideous her outfit was and how much better they looked in their own.

  “It was,” Jenny said, “a total bitchfest.”

  Desperate Measurements

  Even if you don’t hire Zac Posen to design your outfit or decide to have it customized with hand-glued Swarovski crystals, the average bridesmaid dress now costs between two and three hundred dollars—roughly the equivalent of a month’s rent in a small town or a week’s worth of groceries in the big city. And that’s before the cost of alterations.

  Martha C. received her dress rhree days before her university friend’s wedding—and three months after it was ordered—at a cost of $225. The bridal party had selected their dresses (a top with buttons up the back paired with a long skirt) on the Internet, requesting three versions in three different sizes. The other two bridesmaids were five-foot-nine and extremely slender, ordering a size zero and a size two, respectively, and Martha is just shy of five feet and wears a size twelve.

  When the order showed up on the manufacturer’s end, the numbered sizes appeared as 0 2 1 2, and the company believed the group had accidentally ordered four dresses instead of three. Confused, an employee called the bride’s mother and asked how many dresses they wanted. When the MOB answered “three,” they arbitrarily sent a zero and two size twos.

  “So I had roughly forty-eight hours to figure out how to get my size-twelve ass into that dress,” Martha said.

  In a panic, she searched frantically for fabric that was similar to the dress. She then went to a seamstress, who agreed to insert new panels, transforming a size two into a size twelve overnight. Unfortunately, the seamstress overcompensated a little in her rush to the finish line. When Martha got dressed on the day of the wedding, the ensemble was far too big. The buttons kept slipping out of the holes, and the back of her top would open up to reveal that the skirt was pulled up to her chest.

  “Every time the waitress would serve a course of the meal, she would put the plate down with one hand and do up my buttons with the other,” said Martha. “The dress ended up costing me $430.”

  To avoid this last-minute expense, some women adopt a do-it-yourself attitude toward alterations. Allison P. was named Maid of Honor for her best friend when they were both still in college, and The Bride found inexpensive dresses for her wedding party so they wouldn’t have to dip into their student loans to pay for them. The Bride had fallen in love with a lilac-colored dress with a simple boxy cut and straps that crisscrossed down the back, dotted with tiny rosettes. Allison did not hate the dress, but when she held it up to her body, she saw that it was cut for a woman half her height.

  “It’s made for a much shorter person,” said the five-foot-ten and curvy bridesmaid. “The hem on me hit probably mid-calf.”

  The spaghetti straps and open back also meant that a bra was out of the question despite Allison’s ample chest. The dress was bought against her reservations, and The Bride tried to comfort her buxom friend by telling her she could make any alterations she wanted, as long as the rosettes—and her breasts—remained firmly in place.

  Allison set about turning the ill-fitting dress into something slightly less revealing but somehow even more absurd. “The dress came with this chiffon shawl wrap thing,” she said. “So while everyone else had their wrap nicely draped over their arms, I basically took mine and built it into the dress.” First, she bunched the shawl around the straps so her bra would be covered, then wove it through the criss-crossed panels between her shoulder blades to render the back of the dress opaque. “But [The Bride] didn’t want me to cut the shawl, so there was this sort of tail hanging out of the bottom,” Allison went on. “So I ended up with this chiffon crisscrossed, braided mess at the back of the dress, a chiffon tail, and these cappy chiffon sleeves. It looked ridiculous.”

  Still, Allison probably didn’t stick out as much as she thought. Consider the fate of another bridesmaid in the same wedding, who could not afford to alter a dress that was equally ill suited for her tiny frame. In the wedding photos, Allison’s dress just barely scrapes her knees, her improvised wrap creating billowing shoulder pads, while the other girl, a tiny thing, drowns inside a dress that is at least four sizes too big, the straps falling off her shoulders and two feet of extra material pooled at her feet.

  Allison’s design looked almost sophisticated by comparison.

  Mail-Order Bridezilla

  Bridesmaids may wear the dress down the aisle, but it is the garment that carries the ultimate power. Without their matching outfits, wedding attendants are nothing more than a bunch of pissed-off and pissed-drunk women who get to sit at the head table and see their names printed on the program.

  Gemma H., a five-timer, had ordered her bridesmaid dress months in advance of her friends wedding and well before the other six women who were acting as bridal attendants. The group had picked out their look online—further victims of an Internet shopping phenomenon that creates more confusion and regret than accidentally hitting Reply All after typing something dirty about your boss.

  The gown was a pastel green two-piece with an A-line skirt and spaghetti straps, to be delivered to a store in The Bride’s hometown, about a forty-five-minute drive from where Gemma lived. Hers happened to arrive first, a month or so before the wedding, and The Bride offered to pick it up herself and give it to Gemma the next time they met.

  The handoff, however, proved more difficult than they had anticipated. The two women would pick a day when they were both available, but The Bride would cancel at the last minute with a forgotten appointment or emergency excuse.

  “Every time I called her to go get it she ended up backing out,” Gemma remembered. �
�And there were a couple of times when I made a real effort to get the dress.”

  There were now just three weeks until the wedding, and Gemma was scheduled to leave her East Coast home for a two-week vacation in California. When she got home, there would be only days until the wedding, and The Bride would be too busy to deliver the dress. Gemma offered two choices: The Bride could be available to hand it off on a specific date, or she could FedEx it to Gemma’s home and the bridesmaid would absorb the cost. The Bride agreed to courier the dress, but instead of shelling out the ten dollars to send it overnight, she bundled it up and sent it regular mail. The package was headed just one town over, she reasoned, so she also waived insurance for her special delivery.

  Unfortunately, when The Bride was addressing the package, she accidentally wrote the wrong zip code.

  “The dress never arrived,” Gemma said.

  She returned from vacation, but the package had not turned up. Every day she would run to the mailbox, getting more and more worried that it wouldn’t show up for the big day. The Bride began calling the postal service on a daily basis, begging them to find the dress and even offering a reward for information on its whereabouts.

  One day, Gemma’s husband asked the postman if he had seen a package with their names on it kicking around the mail room.

  “He said, ‘Oh gosh, are you guys the bridesmaid-dress house?’” Gemma recalled. “She had everyone looking for it.”

  Five of the other bridesmaids had picked up their dresses by now, and the sixth, who lived in Seattle, had received hers in the mail two days after it was sent from the East Coast bride. Gemma held out hope until the last moment, thinking she could still get the outfit altered on the day of, if necessary, but ultimately resigned herself to the fact that if she had nothing to wear, she had no claim to be in the party

  “The day before, I said, ‘Well, I guess I’m not in the wedding,’ and [The Bride] said, ‘No, I guess not,” Gemma remembered.