Red Dress!

I just had my wedding dress fitting this weekend, so I think it's time for a dress oriented post!

Since at least high school I've been saying that if I ever get married that I'd wear a red dress. The Chinese traditionally wear red dresses because they consider red a lucky color and white is what they wear at funerals.



Red is also a traditional wedding color in India. And I won't lie, I considered getting married in a Sari...



And when we started planning the wedding, I never even considered a white dress. It had to be red. For one, living somewhere that is often over 100 degrees in the summer, I wear white dresses all the time. What I wear are certainly not wedding dresses, but since I already wear white all the time, it didn't seem particularly special.



The tradition of white dress started with Queen Victoria in 1840, who wore white for her wedding to incorporate some lace she already owned. Since then it had become the norm. But before then, ladies would wear whatever color they wanted. Often, they would just wear the nicest dress they owned.



But red dresses have gotten very big these days. A lot of major bridal lines will include one or two red dresses. One big plus of the red dress is that any white dress automatically costs at least twice as much as the same dress in any other color. (Similarly, if you putting 'wedding' in front of anything it automatically doubles the price).



So I started looking just at high end evening gowns. But the downside was that while there are one million white dresses to choose from, there are less red dresses to chose from. So you are less likely to find one that you really like.

But despite what I had always envisioned for my wedding, what really held me back was actually the color red! I think red looks really amazing on a big gown. Just look at some of these pictures to see how striking it is. But trekking out to the middle of nowhere in Iceland, a big gown is kind of out of the question. And as I looked at the red not-ballgowns, I started to notice that on more sheath style gowns it looked...um...well...kind of too sexy.



So, if I couldn't wear a big ballgown dress, where the red looks amazing -- and was planning on wearing a slimmer dress, where really the red comes off too sexy -- well, then it just wasn't going to be red.

I will reveal to you one big secret. Stop reading if you don't want to know! After all this...my dress...is pink. At least it's red meets white! Pink just looks better on me, with my brown hair and eyes. It's definitely more my style. So after 10 years of swearing by the red dress...



(Don't worry, I am not wearing a Hello Kitty dress!)

Therefore, you may eschew the convention of not wearing white to a wedding if you want to -- although it will be after Labor Day. You just can't win!