The Wedding Dress Hunt, Take III

I had been having some issues with finding a dress, but I knew that I needed to broaden my horizons as to what I was looking at, no beading had turned into some beading and further into “enough beading to be seen in photographs.” A week or two after the last dress outing I emailed the girls to see if they would accompany me to another bridal salon. This time, we would go to Belle Saison.

The staff was fabulous! I had called earlier that week to see if I needed an appointment, and the woman who answered the phone replied that I didn’t. I called with a new list of dresses that I might want to try, and the store had most of them, but for several of the ones that the store did not carry, the salesperson told me that she had specific dresses by other designers that looked extremely similar to the dress I was speaking to her about.

I arrived at the store in the afternoon, and there was an empty dressing room waiting for me. A saleswoman greeted me, remembered that I had called, and showed me the layout of the store, which was by style of dress. She asked us to simply pull the dresses I liked, then put them on the end of the row and she would put them in the room for us. When we had pulled them, we went to the dressing room, I was instructed to put on the strapless bra and slip and then ask her to come back in so that she could dress me. “Oh, no, I can’t have a stranger dressing me!” is the thought that went through my head, but it was actually a lot faster. She literally threw the dress on over my head.

Even better, she knew what I was thinking almost before I did. She reassured me that I would try on many pretty dresses, but that I would find “the one.” We pulled almost a dozen different dresses that I tried on, but the second one struck a chord. She advised me to try on the rest of the dresses, just to see. I wanted to, as well, as I had come to try on a certain one, which was nearly solid beads on the bodice, with a plainer skirt. The dress was a little bling-bling, gorgeous dress, but definitely a party dress. I later told my fiancé that if we were having a “platinum wedding,” and I were going to have two dresses, that would be my reception dress.