So far, the summer before my senior year of college was looking good. I had landed a fantastic internship with an exciting advertising agency in New York, and my roommates were my fiance and my best friend from high school. I could not have asked for a more perfect time and place to begin the hunt for my wedding dress! After watching several episodes of Say Yes to the Dress, I booked an appointment online and officially took my first step in this eventful process.
If there is anything that reality wedding shows have taught me, it’s that I needed to have a good idea of what I was looking for before stepping foot into any bridal shop. This involves a great deal of honesty, because I know that what looks glamorous on the models will look… er… less glamorous on my “real” body. So, I did what any logical bride-to-be would do in this situation.
I made a PowerPoint.
I wanted my bridal gown consultants to know exactly what I had in mind to avoid getting distracted by all the glitz. I also kept it short and realistic. Perhaps the most surprising element is that not all of my pictures were of dresses. I wanted my dress to be a mix of elegant, sexy, and classic. To demonstrate this, one of my slides had a picture of Marilyn Monroe and a bottle of nice perfume.
My message? My dress can’t be overly sexy, yet not so classic that it gives off a stuffy air.
My last slide was a humorous (or at least I thought so) picture of a pear with a measuring tape. I am very aware of my shape, and I did not want to be put into any dress that showed off the wrong areas of my body.
The result? The perfect dress. I admit, I had a ton of fun trying on the dresses that my two best friends chose, but the sparkly sequence ball gowns were far from what I was looking for. I’m happy that I was able to find a dress on my first day of hunting, and I owe my success to my prep work.
Just for fun, my mom and I started looking through my PowerPoint a few weeks ago, now 5 months from when I bought my dress. We both started laughing when we noticed that one of my example dress pictures is a near exact match to the gown I bought.