Beauty & Fashion

Design Your Perfect Wedding Dress

A bride on her wedding day should look more beautiful and radiant than ever before and a gorgeous, flattering wedding dress is the most important part of her look. But, what should you do if you have looked everywhere for the perfect wedding dress to suit your style and flatter your figure and you haven’t found anything suitable?

Do not despair – you can design your own dream wedding dress. If you or a close friend or relative are nifty with a needle, then you might even be able to design and make your wedding dress yourself.

You could also enlist the services of a professional wedding dress designer. Although this is the most expensive way of buying a wedding dress, you will at least know that the dress is exactly how you want it to be and you could even economize in other areas of the wedding in order to compensate for the extra expense on the dress.

You could also regard the expense of a bespoke wedding dress as an investment: either as a family heirloom that could be used by generations to come or as a dress that you would be willing to sell onto another bride after your wedding.

Working with a Wedding Dress Designer

Try to find a wedding dress designer through recommendation: did you admire a friend’s stunning wedding dress that you heard that was designed especially for her? Ask her who the designer was.

Before meeting the designer, it is a good idea to make a scrapbook of ideas for your wedding dress. For example, if you like the bodice of one gown and the train of another, cut out pictures of both dresses, stick them in the scrapbook and make notes by the side of each picture on what you like and don’t like about each dress.

You could also collect swatches of fabric in the colors and textures that you would like for your dress. You may even wish to make a few preliminary sketches of your dream dress yourself, but this is not necessary.

If you would like to wear a special necklace or other piece of jewelry with your wedding dress, show that to the designer too. He or she may be able to use it as inspiration or to ensure that the dress will fit in with your accessories.

Be prepared for the designer to ask you several questions about yourself and your fashion likes and dislikes in order to gain a picture of who you are and whether or not you would like a traditional, romantic dress or a more modern ‘alternative’ design. Perhaps take along a close friend or relative who knows you well and who would be able to give the designer extra information that you perhaps would not think of yourself.

After the initial meeting with the designer, he or she will go away and come up with perhaps two or three initial designs for you to look at when you next meet. Be as honest as possible at this meeting: if you don’t like a particular design or if there is something you would like to alter, let the designer know now rather than after the dress has been made!

The designer will modify the designs and come up with a final draft design. You then have the opportunity to either agree with this design or make changes. Once a final agreement has been reached, the dress will be made for you and you will probably have several fittings at which minor alterations can be made.

When your wedding day arrives, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your wedding dress is truly one of a kind, as unique as you are!