After noticing that a lot of the other girls had their dresses already, the pressure was on for me to find one. I was not looking forward to the experience. A lot of girls relish shopping for pretty dresses. I am not one of those girls. Simply because they usually do not fit me. For one thing, I'm 5'3". I am short. For another thing, I'm sort of...well, soft. Chubby. Curvy. And finally, my boobs are really big. Obnoxiously big. Which instantly makes any dress I can actually get on less tasteful.
Dress shopping for me is never fun. I think every dress shopping excursion to date has ended with me in tears, yelling at my mom, hating on myself, or making dramatic threats to try out an eating disorder. Usually it is a combination of the four, if not all of them.
So, when I found out I would be shopping for a debutante dress in a bridal store, two things entered my mind:
1. this is going to be awful, and
2. everything I know about bridal shops comes from 'Say Yes to the Dress.'
(Seriously, I love that show. I watch it pretty much every Sunday morning for hours instead of doing homework).
I just had this sinking feeling that nothing was going to fit me right, and I would end up looking like the bride of Frankenstein, but with less hair.
My mom and I went to David’s Bridal on a Saturday afternoon while they were having some sort of dress sale. We walked in and were instructed by the sales associates to start looking at dresses and putting some on aside so I could try them on. They took down my name so they could give me a dressing room when one was available, but something apparently got screwed up and my name never went on the list.
So we wandered awkwardly for about an hour, checking and rechecking same 4 racks of dresses, making sure there was nothing good we were overlooking, not realizing there was a problem. I was almost taken out – twice – by the same tiny sales associate who was carrying multiple dresses four times her size. It was both terrifying and impressive.
After we all realized there was mistake, I was assigned a dressing room and a consultant named Brittany. She gave me this medieval torture device of a super-bra (which didn’t fit, so I had to go up like three sizes), even though I was already wearing a strapless bra (which she later had to convince me to take off – yes I wore two for a time). She also gave me a slip vaguely reminiscent of something Little Bo-Peep would wear while herding her sheep. After I had the undergarments on, Brittany helped me into my first dress.
The dress was awful. I looked like a marshmallow that had been covered by tulle and then encased in snow. So I took it off and put on one Brittany had pulled for me.
I put it on and stepped out of the dressing room and immediately felt like Belle in “Beauty and the Beast.” The skirt of the dress had a bunch of ruffled pick-ups (yes, that’s what they’re called Jess; I finally remembered) and the top was a halter, which kept my obnoxiously large boobs contained.
The problem was that the dress was long even with heels. To temporarily remedy the problem, Brittany gave me a bigger slip to go underneath, and while I could no longer fit through the door of the dressing room without the dress touching the doorframe, it was even more perfect. Brittany outfitted me with a beaded sash to go around the waist, and the look was complete.
This was the dress.
I actually did try on another one, and it was pretty and I liked it, but I felt prettier in the other dress.
So although it was completely exhausting, the process wasn’t actually all that painful. I loved the girls at David’s and even recently went back there for a prom dress (which I love just as much). The most horrifying part of the process was that they gave us the ‘wedding gown discount,’ because the dress we bought was actually a wedding gown. It’s just that when you’re 18, you don’t really want to be able to say ‘I bought a wedding dress today.’
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