Wedding Dress Shopping Didn’t Feel Magical

My potential wedding look

I started shopping for wedding dresses a few months ago. The strangest thing happened: I expected to feel giddy and excited—maybe the way I did when I was eight, shopping for my birthday dress—but I didn’t. The culprit? Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. In her chapter on wedding dresses, aptly titled “The Oh Mommy Moment,” Mead describes the moment when it can feel as though the dress is choosing the bride as much as she is choosing the dress—eliciting an almost childlike “oh, mommy” (Mead, 77). She goes on to discuss the bridal industry more broadly, eventually traveling all the way to a Chinese wedding dress factory (Mead, 94). It’s an unfortunate adage, but when clothing is manufactured in China, we know the production cost is likely far lower than the final retail price. Mead doesn’t give a specific figure for what it costs to produce a wedding dress, but she notes that workers at the Top Fashion factory earned about $150 per month.

I’m not here to tell any bride that her dress was made with exploitative labor. What I am saying is that the price I faced at Vow’d was almost certainly marked up by a percentage I don’t even want to calculate. And the irony didn’t escape me: a dress I would wear once cost more than the ring I’ll wear for the rest of my life. I know that sounds childish, but as I navigate this financially precarious season, I’m realizing how little I considered money when I fantasized about my wedding day.

As I stood in a crepe A-line dress with a bridal scarf draped around my neck, I didn’t have the “oh, mommy” moment. I didn’t feel like a princess. I didn’t cry.

My fantasy fell flat because I didn’t feel like a fucking princess—and that’s what was promised. Say Yes to the Dress told me I would feel like a damn princess: I’d put on the dress, stand a little taller, and my friends would declare it “the one.” Ideally, there would be one friend who dissented at first. You always need that friend, because that’s how you know someone cares—when they’re willing to say the unthinkable: that the dress you’ve decided is the one might not be. But eventually she’d be won over, because she loves you more than you love your dress.

That’s not how dress shopping went.

My best friend, Ivy, wasn’t there because I live here and she lives an ocean away. My childhood best friend, Phemi, wasn’t there because I live in the States and she lives in South Africa. What’s the saying about a tree? If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? If I wore a wedding dress and my friends didn’t see it, did I really wear one? And if my closest friends aren’t there to watch me exchange money for a dream, then out of some twisted loyalty, I will not wear a white dress.

I read One Perfect Day because I needed armor. I needed an intellectualized reason to not want a wedding because I can’t want one. I needed the book to tell me that it’s okay not to want a wedding for the simplest reason: my friends—my first loves—cannot be there with me. The certificates have been signed. I feel married. And I’m afraid that might have to be enough.