Fit to be Tied

Let’s get one thing straight: I did not enjoy my wedding dress fitting process. I was not at all prepared for that to be the case. My wedding dress selection process was so lovely and pleasant that I think I expected the same to hold true for the fittings. And I haven’t heard much from other brides about their fittings, so I figured that it must be at worst uneventful and at best enjoyable.

Now, I fully expected the first fitting to be less than wonderful. My dress was ordered to my largest measurement, so it was a little more than three sizes too large in the waist, and I knew I wanted to remove the straps and belt/sash from the get-go. I walked out of the first fitting feeling like I still didn’t have a good sense of what my dress would actually look like on me when it fit but I was 100% confident that it would be fabulous.

Well, someone should warn you about second fittings. You’ve waited months for your dress, and now the seams are open and exposed and it still doesn’t fit and all of a sudden your brain kicks into overdrive. I always made fun of the girls on Say Yes to the Dress when they came in for their fittings and went on and on and on about how that wasn’t their dress and it wasn’t the same as the sample and the color/detailing/proportions/etc. were completely wrong. “They must’ve gotten my dress mixed up with someone else’s,” they would say. I now know that all those girls must just be there for their second fitting, because I was so there. I was so freaked out that I actually tried to go to Gabrielle’s and look at the sample the next day to see if it was different from my dress. And when I got there and they were closed, I called my seamstress and asked her to compare my dress to the sample the next time she was in the shop because I swore that the pleating was different. Seriously.

I ordered my dress when I was living in the San Francisco area last year, so I was hoping to have my dress altered and shipped to me in Portland after the second fitting. But I was way too traumatized after the second fitting to trust that everything would be right, so I decided to fly back down to the Bay for my third fitting. And let me just say that it was worth every penny — ultimately, it only cost me $50 more to fly down and back than to just have my dress shipped. I didn’t have to worry about my dress being rained on, tossed around, and stacked under hundreds of other boxes in shipment. My flight home was nearly empty, so my dress had its very own overhead bin. (Southwest will let you take your dress on board as a carry-on. They don’t have flight attendant closets like some larger airlines do, but if you carefully fold your dress in half, it fits nicely in an overhead.) And the dress had to be taken in again after my third fitting, so being there enabled me to have a fourth fitting to ensure that everything was as it should be.

Eight months, four fittings and two airports later, my dress is home and somehow looks even lovelier in my little pink bedroom than it did at the bridal shop. Not sure how that’s possible but it’s true.