wedding dresses

     yesterday i wore a wedding dress for the first time. since i have never been engaged, i have never gone wedding dress shopping before. but earlier this week my friend katie texted me asking if i would mind modeling vintage wedding dresses for some event her mom was planning. sounded like fun to me. 

     so katie's mom is a member of some community women's club thing and they planned this fashion show where all the wedding dresses were the ones worn by the members or their daughters. they had all the original photos on display and had 5 of us modeling the dresses. besides me and katie, there were 3 young girls who were 13-15 years old. they had to get these young girls to help because some of these dresses were soooooo tiny. katie had the opportunity to try the dresses on ahead of time so she knew she would be wearing one from the 60's and one from the 80's. so she decided to do this fancy updo that would work for both. since i suck at doing fancy hair and had no idea what decade i would be wearing, i just had my hair straight and down. 

here is the first dress i tried on:

it was an 80's dress but it was so tiny the 13 year old had to wear it instead.

so this was the dress i ended up wearing:

     it was made in 1947. i wasn't sure i'd be able to put it on at first. when i held it up it definitely looked like it would fit, but when we tried putting it on over my head it got stuck at my shoulders. it took 4 tries. the first three we kept stopping because we were afraid of ripping it. finally this one lady who had tried it on before and knew what to do just yanked it down and everything was fine. we pinned the veil on my head and it was awesome. 

     during the event we had to slowly walk around the room so that all the tables of women could see the dresses. it was a lot of fun with all the ladies smiling and clapping. i got to stop for pictures and have all these women tell me how beautiful i looked. they pointed out the woman who wore it and her husband while i was walking and at the very end the husband waved me over to him. i walked over there and he shook my hand and said, "i just wanted to see that dress again." how adorable is that?!?

     when i got backstage, which was the sunday room of a methodist church, the lady running the event quickly got me out of the dress with another yank. there was a lot of confusion as she told me she was going to get my next dress, when i wasn't even sure i had another dress to wear. so i basically stood around in my underwear for at least 5 minutes while i helped other girls in and out of dresses and tried to figure out if there was another dress to wear. there wasn't so i finally put my clothes on. 

     katie had some pretty fantastic dresses to wear. the hair she did was perfect for the 60's dress, which looked amazing on her, and the other dress was her mother's wedding dress from 1980. here are pics:

and here we are posing together :)

     when it was all done we got to look at all the old photos. katie and i kept pointing out all the amazing older dresses we wish we could have also worn for the fashion show. then katie's mom introduced me to the couple whose wedding dress i wore. they were so sweet. they are still married now, 65 years later. i felt so special and honored to wear their dress. i can only hope that a little bit of their good luck rubbed off on me and hopefully i can have as long and happy a marriage as they have someday. 

     afterwards katie and i joked about how those pics of us in wedding dresses together would make us look like a lesbian couple getting married. and since we had been confused for a lesbian couple before, it was particularly funny. (when she went with me to my high school reunion, at least a few people clearly thought we were a couple. but since i can't imagine having more fun with a guy that night, i don't give a shit.) so then we joked about what our lesbian wedding would be like. it's kinda too bad that we are both straight, because we have very similar tastes and would put on one hell of a party :)