Hey there lovelies. Before we head off for festive fun over the weekend, Amy is here to share about her vintage dress shopping experience. Ekk I am so excited to see the dress :-) She also touches on an important issue about bridal body confidence. Thanks so much Amy XOXO Lou

 

 

Since it was the first thing I ticked off the wedding to do list, before we’d even booked a venue, I suppose I should talk about THE DRESS.

 

I kind of knew that I wanted to go for a vintage dress, I love the idea of the dress having a previous life and the shape of 1950′s dresses appeals to me much more than a traditional sleeveless long white dress. I decided to book an appointment at a wedding dress shop any way, to see which shapes suited me and if I could be swayed into buying a new dress. I certainly wasn’t swayed; I found the whole experience awkward – the dresses all seemed to stiff and big on my little frame, and I ended up pretending to love the only dress I didn’t completely hate! I’m not someone who really expected to enjoy the whole dress shopping thing, I don’t like clothes shopping generally and didn’t even take anyone along with my as I wasn’t keen on prelonging the experience. I did find it useful though to see what suited me; I’d been considering getting a cropped dress to fully embrace the 1950′s style, but found the floor length dresses much more flattering even though I’m quite short. I didn’t enjoy the experience much, it made me worry a bit that I was too picky I hadn’t liked anything in the whole shop, but I love a plethora of new and vintage wedding dresses online so I think that it was just a matter of having different taste to the types of dresses that were there.

 

I spent months scouring the internet for dress ideas, and had a secret pinterest board which I could finally make public once Dan had proposed! I ended up choosing a dress on etsy, and decided to just go for it – I guess it helped that with a vintage item you don’t know when someone else might snap it up so you’re forced into making a decision. It was really exciting to go and pick up the box from the post office (n.b. brides to be might want to keep in mind that when buying things from America you have to pay some kind of customs tax charge, it’s worth factoring in to the cost), and to try the dress on. I can’t talk too much about the actual dress because Dan hasn’t seen it, but it’s a lovely 1950′s full-length off-white number. It’s really exciting to think that someone probably got married in it in the 1950′s – wow! I didn’t try it on and feel all “wow this is ‘the one’”, but I didn’t really expect to find anything which made me feel like that. In fact it took about three times of trying on to decide that I love it. We only moved to our current house relatively recently, but I’m still slightly ashamed to admit that we still don’t have a full length mirror, so I can only see myself from either waist up or waist down in it. Which might be for the best because I LOVE the skirt of it, quite like the belly-button up (although it needs altering a bit), but in between those to bits – namely the hips – I don’t really like at all.

 

And this is where I come to my horribly vain worries about how I look/how I think I look on the day. Do I dislike the middle section of the dress or just my middle section? I feel nervous about being the centre of attention for the day. In the past I’ve not attended things because when I got ready I felt fat and ugly, and I feel stupid for being so vain and thinking that people would be looking at me; but at my wedding people will be looking at me, I will be centre of attention, and people will notice how I look. My body confidence is not at an all time high, hell my confidence generally is at a fairly low level – I change nappies, cook food, clean up and play with and talk to a one year old all day, every day. Well, that’s not strictly true, I’ve recently returned to my old job at Waterstones for a few days a week until Christmas, and it’s done wonders for my confidence – it turns out that I can still function as a normal person away from Rose, and no-one’s laughed (openly) at my inability to talk to other adults yet. But my point still stands – being a stay at home mum makes me feel a bit out of touch with the world, and a lot less young and hip than I did before. Maybe a wedding will be the perfect solution for me! But I do worry about the way in which it’s fairly universally excepted that in order to look their best on their wedding day, it’s normal for a bride to go on a pre-wedding diet – that to look my best I must look my thinnest. When I moan about feeling like I don’t look good I can feel people shouting “but you’re slim, you have no right to feel crap about your body”. Well I do. Throughout my late teens and early twenties I suffered with an eating disorder. I was sort of over it by my mid twenties but I was still using bulimic behaviour to get through stressful situations up until the point that I got pregnant, but I’m very please to say that I haven’t even thought about it since. Here’s a photo of me when I was a huge blooming pregnant woman, I kept a pregnancy diary with a photo each week which I love looking back on…

 

 

I loved being pregnant, suddenly my body was for something much more important than the way it looks, and despite feeling huge and having truly thunderous thighs, I couldn’t have been happier. But now that Rose isn’t breast feeding any more my body is back to just being mine. I still worry about it much less than before, and have been reasonably happy to slob out for a while eating things I shouldn’t eat and enjoying being at home and not having any reason to care too much about how I look. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to look nice for a change, or more specifically to feel like I looked nice. I will eat well and possibly even exercise in the weeks leading up to the wedding, I do want to look my best and I will feel more confident if I’m not thinking about my fat back (Alan Partridge reference!), and I’ve no fears that I’ll succumb to temptations to go back to old eating disorder behaviours, Rose is way too important to me now for me to indulge myself in such silliness, but I do fear getting so caught up in worrying about my body that I forget to enjoy all the other parts of planning the big day.

 

Does anyone else feel like all the positive messages about looking and feeling your best on your wedding day actually feel like huge pressures? I’m not sure whether or not to get my hair and make-up done professionally, I’m leaning towards not because I don’t want to feel like I’m not myself, but I am pretty terrible at both hair and make-up so maybe I’d look better leaving it to the experts. I’m going to see how much I like the dress once it’s been altered to fit me properly nearer the time, but if it’s making me feel unsure about my body then maybe it’s not the dress for me. Luckily because it’s vintage I’m fairly confident that I could sell it for as much as I paid for it, and will keep an eye out for other dresses online – there’s plenty of time at least.

 

I’m really excited about finding a cute dress for my little girl, who will be a bridesmaid alongside my sister, and have started looking out for a nice, cheap veil – who knew that a piece of translucent fabric could be so expensive?!