by Siri Agrell
The Bride felt bad about the mix-up, but Gemma said she was not as apologetic or upset as she could have been. “She said to me, ‘If this is going to be the worst thing that’s going to happen at my wedding, that’s not so bad. I was like, ‘Oh, thanks.’”
After the wedding, Gemma kept checking the mail hoping that the wayward gown would arrive and she could donate it to charity, claiming the $150 price as a tax write-off. It never did.
“I truly believe that some twelfth-grader in Ohio wore my bridesmaid dress to her prom,” she said.
Baby Bumped
Tina M. was also expecting a delivery when she was asked to stand up as a bridesmaid for a life-long friend. The twenty-four-year-old was newly married and ready for her first child. “I explained to her that I was trying to get pregnant and that the timing wouldn’t be right as far as sizing the dress,” she said.
The Bride assured Tina that it would be no problem, invoking her sister-in-law, who had just been a bridesmaid while she was nine months pregnant. When the time came, Tina explained to the saleswoman that she needed to order a much larger size than would fit her current measurements.
Instead of saying congratulations and suggesting a good maternity bra to match the dress, the saleswoman did her best impersonation of the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts is expelled from a Rodeo Drive boutique. Store policy prevented women from ordering anything more than two sizes too big, the saleswoman explained haughtily, an arbitrary and nonsensical rule that she refused to bend for the sake of a baby.
“So I measured at a size ten and plunked down ninety dollars for a size-twelve bridesmaid dress that was made of the unforgiving fabric of chiffon over satin,” Tina said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t wait to see how this is going to turn out.”
In June, Tina was five months pregnant when she went for her last fitting at the bridal boutique. Her stomach was swollen with child, the elastic waistband on her pants as tight as the saleswoman’s ass. She pulled the dress over her head, knowing deep down that the zipper would not close. The snobbish saleswoman stood there for several minutes, her hand on her chin, and for a moment Tina was convinced that she was going to tell her that she would have to lose the baby. In the end, the woman coldly and unapologetically informed her that there was nothing to be done, because they had built in only half an inch of extra material even though they had known she was pregnant.
“I had two more weeks of growth to go before the wedding,” said Tina. “I stood there looking at the dress hanging on my bloated body, thinking, ‘Oh, I’m so screwed.’”
The store said it was too late to order another dress, and Tina was forced to call The Bride and explain that she literally had nothing to wear. The Bride did not take the news well, nor did she take out her frustrations on the store and its size-ist attitude. “She told me that she’d had a list of the bridesmaids and ushers professionally printed that was to be placed on all the plates on the tables of the wedding guests,” she said, “and now they couldn’t be used, and that it was a waste of money.”
Tina, of course, still had to pay for her dress.
Playing the MasterCard
It’s easy to blame Bad Bridesmaid experiences on dressmakers and store clerks, but just imagine the number of dysfunctional bridal parties they have had to deal with in their time. Deborah McCoy, a wedding planner who owns her own bridal store in Boca Raton, Florida, said she nearly stopped stocking bridesmaid dresses because of the drama it entailed, and changed the policy in her boutique to contend with imploding wedding parties.
Originally, when brides ordered their attendants’ gowns, McCoy asked for a 50 percent deposit up front and the rest of the cost when the dresses came in. She discovered, though, that bridesmaids frequently went bye-bye before the dresses were even sewn, with a bride throwing her friend out of the wedding or the attendant storming off in disgust.
“I’d be stuck with the dresses,” McCoy explained. “So I said, ‘I want all of it up front.’ That’s how bad it got.”
A bridesmaid-dress designer named Sadie. T. witnessed a Surreal Life-quality bridal party meltdown when a bride changed her mind about the gowns at the last minute. The woman had come into the store weeks earlier with three of her five bridesmaids, and they had all happily settled on the idea of selecting individual styles in the same color and fabric.
“The girls were going to end up in a dress that they were comfortable in, in a color that they looked good in, and they were so excited,” Sadie said.
She should have known it would never be that easy. On the day of the groups first consultation, The Bride swept in with all five bridesmaids in tow, and while they selected the style of their individual dresses, she was busy putting a kink in their plans. She sidled over to a rack of last season’s styles and zeroed in on a strapless gold brocade number from the store’s fall/winter collection that screamed of fabric-induced heatstroke. “It’s beautiful, but the wedding is in the middle of August,” Sadie said. “The dresses are made from heavy, heavy synthetic brocade and are lined in acetate. I don’t care if it’s strapless, you would die in that dress in the summer.”
By that point, unfortunately, The Bride had abandoned reason along with the promise that her attendants would be comfortable. She pulled the dress off the rack and instructed one of the bridesmaids to try it on. To show that they were willing to be good sports, all of the women tried on the dress, hoping to demonstrate how bad it looked and how much each of them truly hated it. The gold hue did not suit anyone’s coloring and the conservative cut made them look like a women’s choir about to perform at an abstinence convention.
“A couple of them were kind of okay with the shape but none of them liked the fabric,” Sadie said. “But the bride just made the executive decision, ‘You’re all going to wear this dress.’”
With those seven little words, the store descended into chaos. The girls asked The Bride why she had abandoned their original plan, begged her to reconsider, and even threw down a trump card when they felt they were cornered, pointing out that she would now have to change the color of their bouquets, which had already been ordered.
Unmoved, The Bride told them her decision was final, and that her bridesmaids would wear brocade. It was then that things turned ugly. The bridesmaids starred screaming profanities at their friend as she yelled over and over, “It’s my day! It’s my day!” The wedding attendants called her selfish and The Bride told them if they were really her friends they would do as she said. Throughout it all, the Father of the Bride sat in a corner at the back of the store, smiling serenely. He did not intervene or offer an opinion, chastise his daughter, or apologize for the ruckus.
“He just crossed his hands, like, ‘Whatever my baby wants, my baby gets,’” Sadie recalled with dismay.
With no chance of a third-party intervention, the bridal party broke off into groups to plan their next move. Two of the bridesmaids consoled The Bride, smoothing her hair and telling her that everything would work out fine. The other three gathered in a huddle at the front of the store, the defensive line planning their last, desperate Hail Mary pass. It was clear no one was going to back down and, like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, each would forever blame the other for the demise of their relationship.
Finally, the disgruntled bridesmaids asked The Bride flat out to make a decision between them and the dresses. Her response came without a pause: “If you were really my friends, you wouldn’t make me choose.”
“They said ‘Okay, that’s all we need to hear. Find yourself three more fucking bridesmaids,’” Sadie remembered. “And they left. They stormed out.”
By this point the other two bridesmaids were sobbing, The Bride was pale, and Sadie held her breath to see what would happen next. She expected a tearful apology, for The Bride to run after her friends or apologize to her for creating such a disturbance in the store. Instead, to everyone’s surprise, The Bride reached into her purse.
“She took out her Visa,” Sadie sa
id, “slammed it down on the counter, paid for two gold brocade strapless dresses, and walked out.”
Whatever baby wants, baby gets.
The Golden Shower
I did a little mental addition, and over the years, I have bought Keira an engagement gift, a wedding gift—then there was the trip to Maine for the wedding—and three baby gifts. In total, I have spent over 52,300 celebrating her choices.
Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City
The Bride wanted patio furniture.
This was the news that filtered through the bridal party in the early weeks of April, as we began planning the requisite shower for our friend’s impending nuptials.
My own patio furniture came with the apartment I share with my boyfriend—an assortment of cheap white plastic covered in a film of grime, booze, grease from the restaurant downstairs, and the deposits of various urban creatures that have visited the sixteen-square-foot deck in the past decade.
It was, in other words, the least romantic thing I could think of and also the last thing I could have imagined being bothered to ask for. Much like a wedding shower, come to think of it.
Thankfully, patio furniture was deemed by my sister attendants to be suitably uninspired, expensive, and difficult to wrap and thus warranted an executive bridesmaid veto. The Bride suggested a bedroom set; we settled on lingerie.
Like most things that start out as a good concept and end in humiliation—high school dances, for example—bridal showers are often organized around a theme that the bridesmaids must conceive, develop, and stringently enforce.
It is one of the cruel twists of female life that you can demand a specific list of presents only if you simultaneously agree to parade yourself around dressed up as a virginal cupcake, and while brides rightfully relish this opportunity, I live in constant bitterness that I cannot similarly declare my next birthday to be shoe-themed, therefore requiring all of my friends to pony up for a closetful of new heels.
Bridesmaids are rarely asked to help the bride acquire truly necessary items, like stilettos, but rather to create a surplus in her fantasy world—one that boasts a perfectly stocked kitchen (who really uses egg slicers?) and a thrilling boudoir.
For my friend’s shower, I was given a piece of paper with The Bride’s measurements and found myself spending an afternoon contemplating how she would look in flagrante delicto in a variety of expensive lacy accoutrements. On the day of, she unwrapped enough underwear to pull off a solo Victoria’s Secret lingerie show, encouraged by the earnest nods of her friends and co-workers, who confirmed to one another knowingly, “He’s really going to like that one.”
The absurdity of outfitting a friend like a high-class call girl is not to be acknowledged by polite bridesmaids, who must steadfastly ignore the fact that in teal life the bride wears flannel jam-mies and shouldn’t be able to keep a straight face wearing white down the aisle, let alone in the sack.
To this day, I can’t help but imagine my friend walking seductively into her marital bedroom wearing nothing but five inches of black silk and whispering softly into her husbands ear, “This one’s from your mom.”
Toil of Olé
Jodie G. woke up on the morning of her childhood friend’s bridal shower hungover and already running late. The party was being held at a cottage several hours outside the city, and she knew there was no way to get there on time. It was the sixth in a string of pre-wedding happenings, and this bridesmaid had learned that the bride’s mother hewed to stria schedules and unbending etiquette. Punctuality is a virtue brides are told to look for in their wedding attendants, and being late (even with a good reason like having just enjoyed a wicked night of draft beer and karaoke) is classic Bad Bridesmaid behavior.
In an effort to appease the MOB, Jodie did a detour to pick up a case of Corona and a variety of fun summer decorations like sombreros and fold-up paper lanterns. “I figured, how can anybody have a frown on their face when they are wearing a sombrero?” she said afterward.
Bridesmaids, though, are required to shop within the category of an Assigned Shower Theme, and any deviation, no matter how minor or well-intentioned, can cause an instantaneous demotion in the bridesmaid hierarchy. Jodie got to the cottage an hour late and saw the other guests sitting in a circle on the porch, sipping white wine spritzers and nibbling hors d’oeuvres in “perfect wedding shower formation.” The other bridesmaids kept pads of paper in their laps, jotting down notes as The Bride and her mother held court.
Jodie jumped out of the car and ran over to the group, arms laden with all the goodies she had brought to make up for her tardiness. Laughing and making jokes, she began decorating the porch—hanging streamers and handing out sombreros to the guests.
“About halfway through putting hats on people, I kind of looked out of the corner of my eye and I was getting the devil’s look from the Mother of the Bride,” Jodie remembered. “I could tell everyone was dying to play along but they knew it was better to side with Mom.”
In another setting, this sort of behavior would have been the stuff of fond female memories—a demonstration of individuality and humor that spoke to the intimacy of friendship. Jodie knew, though, that none of the other bridesmaids was going to risk “misbehaving” and take her side. The theme for this shower was clearly not Mexican fiesta, but WASP.
She glanced around and saw finger sandwiches with their crusts cut off and perfect pink decorations, a table overflowing with crisply wrapped packages, and the other guests uniformly outfitted in sweater sets and heels. “And I came and ruined it,” Jodie said. “If it was any other kind of party that I was going to, it would have gone over like a really fun additive. I would have been a hero.”
Going Dutch
The bridal shower had its beginnings in an act of sixteenth-century Good Samaritan sisterhood, when the community of a dowryless bride-to-be in Holland chipped in for gifts that would allow her and her low-income husband to set off on their own, free from Daddy’s fiscal clutches.
The beauty of the shower lay in its pure intentions. The bride had not asked for anything, but her friends were motivated by personal kindness to ensure that she had all the mortars and pestles she needed to set out on her new life, grinding chicken bones for her hubby with a medieval tool that now retails at Williams-Sonoma for $79.95.
It was not until the late nineteenth century that bridal showers were documented in the United States. Initially thrown by rich women in urban areas, the showers swept across North America like the Depression. The bridal registry soon followed, beginning with the Marshall Field’s department store in 1924 and gaining steam from boutiques to chain stores as the public developed a taste for personalized china patterns and light pink Cuisinarts.
Unlike the young Dutch woman to whom the shower tradition can supposedly be traced, the beneficiaries of the modern events often do not actually need much help stocking their pantries. Nowadays, the average bride weds at twenty-seven, an age at which, one hopes, she has not only moved out of her parents’ home but has managed to procure her own stemware and bedsheets. Who needs a hope chest when you have a twenty-thousand-dollar line of credit?
Armed with finely honed shopping skills and wish lists as long as their bank statements, many brides now approach their showers as though they’ve entered the sweepstakes lottery, expecting their bridesmaids to arrange for the jackpot. One bride e-mailed her bridesmaids instructing them not to buy her individual shower gifts but instead to chip in for a stainless steel barbeque. They were still told to host a themed shower for the rest of the guests, however, and The Bride insisted on inviting almost every woman who would be at the wedding, all the better to maximize her haul.
“At the end of the shower, her mom said, ‘Oh, look how we cleaned up,’” said Beatrice R., one of the first-time bridesmaids who had planned, hosted, and paid for the shower of her university friend. “All the guests were still there when she said it. It was very tacky.”
It is completely aboveboard, or so it seems, fo
r brides to register for everything from “his and hers” iPods to home entertainment systems. I’m sure it is only a matter of time before someone registers for a car and asks her bridesmaids to make down payments—or before I snap and get engaged just so I can make people buy me a puppy.
On top of the presents, bridesmaids are also expected to orchestrate an afternoon of festivities to rival the wedding itself. Meals, munchies, a fully stocked bar, and an appropriately deco-rated venue are all on the to-do list. Two California bridesmaids found themselves under the glare of the MOB after the shower they hosted was over. They had dutifully organized a country club brunch for thirty-five female friends and family members and had even arrived early to decorate with the streamers, balloons, and other festive paraphernalia they had bought.
By the time the brunch began, though, only seven people had shown up, including The Bride, her mother, the two bridesmaids, and two friends they had forced to come along.
“We spent $250 on party favors for seven people,” said Courtney L., who has been a bridesmaid four times. The expense was nothing compared with the abuse they endured from the MOB. Originally, The Bride had wanted her shower on a specific Saturday, one that coincided with the beginning of the two bridesmaids’ exam schedules. When they politely explained this and asked to reschedule, they received a “disappointed” phone call from their friend’s mother, asking why they couldn’t accommodate her request.
At the shower itself, the MOB did not acknowledge either woman’s existence until it was time to go home—not an easy thing to do when you can count your lunch companions on one hand. She ignored them through the course of the event, and they passed the time drinking champagne and orange juice to keep their spirits up. Two hours later the gifts had been exchanged and the meal finished, and finally the MOB deigned to address her hosts. The bill had been delivered, and the bridesmaids were reaching to take it when the MOB sniffed, “No, no, I’ll get it.”
