How to find the perfect Bridesmaid dresses
What is a bride without her bridesmaids, they are the girls you turn to when you really need them during the madness of planning a wedding. They are your best friends, the people you choose to share the most special day of your life and your all time BFF's. So of course you want them to feel and look as fabulous as you. You always here horror stories from bridesmaids about being forced to wear the worst, bad fitting, ugly dresses, (have you not seen the film 27 dresses!) and that was something I didn't want to do to my Bridesbabes. That said, I will keep it real here, finding a dress for friends of all different shapes, sizes and heights isn't the easiest of tasks. My vision for my bridesmaids involved a more modern style with them all being in different dresses whilst keeping my theme of rose gold and blush (the design of my engagement ring) Thankfully my wonderful friends at
offered to provide the bridesmaids dresses for my girls, making choosing a much easier process. So today I thought I would share some of my tips on how I found the perfect bridesmaid dresses for my babes.
1. Make a mood board
Start firstly by jotting down on paper what colours, styles and direct inspiration you have. For example I drew most of my inspiration from my rose gold and morganite engagement ring. I loved the gentle blush of the center stone of my ring so that was how I started the process of my mood board.
I created a board on Pinterest
and began to pin styles I liked starting with blush colour as my base, then slowly, when I saw other styles I liked I began to form a mood board of not just colours but styles, lengths and shapes. From that point I began building a vision of what I wanted the girls in. I also made sure to include my friends in this process, sharing ideas and knowing what style dresses were a no-go.
2. Use the right search terms
This may seem like a silly thing to advise, but trust me search terms mean everything when searching for a dress online. After deciding we wanted to search for dresses with a little sparkle I began to look for dresses that matched that aesthetic. Unfortunately sparkle is not an adequate search term, instead I searched for terms such as 'sequinned' and 'embellished' and I began to notice that most of those style dresses were showing as part of the
, so going forward I continually searched using that term.. Also take note of the search terms the website you are looking on uses and remember to re-use them, as you may come to realise items can go out of stock really quickly so checking back whenever you can is imperative. Using filters on colour and length also helps save time especially once you have finally decided what colour palette you are working with.
3. Talk with your girls
Keep a constant line of communication with your pals, we chose to do this over whatsapp, that way we could send in photos and links of styles of dresses we liked and didn't like. I wanted my girls to wear what ever made them feel comfortable, so if they really hated it it was vetoed. We also organised a couple of bridesmaids nights, we ordered pizza and drank bottles of Prosseco and used this as an opportunity for the girls to try the dresses on that we had ordered, and have a good old catch up.
4. Don't get stressed
Planning a wedding is stressful and there are times when you will really feel the strain, but my advise is to try and not take it out on your friends. It took a surprisingly long time to settle on the dresses we went with and in total we tried three styles on before we found one that everyone loved. I'm sure that is pretty typical for a bridesmaid dress search, however the logistics of getting everyone to try things is the really tough part of the whole thing. There were times when arranging to meet was difficult to organise especially with everyone living at various ends of London and my sister being back in Wales. Even posting dresses out to everyone caused stress and I occasionally let that get the better of me. Snapping at your friends is not good and occasionally tone can be completely misread over text so do keep that in mind and don't read into things, trust me often things aren't meant the way you think they are. If something is bugging you, talk it out and move on, holding on to annoyances only makes things more stressful, thankfully my girls understood where I was coming from and within minutes of anything like that we had worked it out. Just remember that they want to make this day as special as possible, so make sure you treat your babes like the queens they are.
