Blush and Bashful: How One Fat Femme Bought Her Dream Wedding Dress

I was not excited about buying a wedding dress.

Or I guess it’s more honest to say I was not excited about shopping for a wedding dress.

I’m a fat femme, and I love dressing up like a fairy princess. In fact, I’d say possibly the best representation of my gender may be exactly that: fairy princess. So perhaps you’d think that finding a wedding dress would feel exciting to me. But if you know anything about the bridal industry, you’d know better. The key part here is that I’m a fat fairy princess. And I’m immersed enough in our culture to know, even though I’d never really seriously considered being a bride, that it’s not easy for fat girls to find beautiful wedding gowns. Even thin people are encouraged to lose weight before their weddings. I felt overwhelmed and flustered before I’d even begun.

My best friends suggested that we go shopping together, but I was hesitant. I understood what “shopping for a wedding dress with your best friends” was supposed to feel like. I knew they were envisioning champagne, giggling, gushing, and a lot of white tulle. “I would die to go wedding dress shopping with you,” my one friend texted me, and I knew she was being supportive and loving and genuine. I wanted to crawl under a rock, never to emerge again.

Actually, what I wanted was to feel excited with them; the two friends in question are also fat femmes, and we live in Portland, so I know I’m lucky when it comes to being surrounded with emotional body positivity and also material options when it comes to fat girl fashion. And yet, I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. I wasn’t sure what I wanted my dress to look like, but I knew that trying on lots of options that were too small for me or getting weird energy from a sales assistant or maybe simply looking at my body and having other people perceive my body too was going to feel really bad. But I didn’t want to disappoint my friends, and as a chronic people pleaser, I was at a loss.

Luckily my future wife has no such qualms saying no when she doesn’t want to do something, and after I spent another afternoon stressing and complaining, she solved the problem simply. “Baby, just tell them you don’t want to go. They love you. They’ll understand.” I texted my friends immediately; of course they understood. I told them I was probably going to buy a dress online. There was a Selkie option I had my eye on. They were excited for me. I tried to relax. I window shopped on my phone. I felt dread.

The thing I learned about shopping for a dress as a fat bride while browsing plus size wedding dresses (I’m rolling my eyes at the designation “plus size” but I’m also here to tell you unfortunately it gets so much worse — the amount of “curvy collections” and “busty bridal” links I had to click through to find things that might cover my body successfully was disturbing) is that there actually is quite a large inventory out there — but it’s very expensive! I had hoped to spend no more than $1500 on a dress; most of the dresses I loved were more in the $3000-$3500 range. But I wouldn’t say that’s a fat tax — it seemed like that’s just the cost of a lot of traditional wedding dresses. I was genuinely shocked!

A lot of my friends who have had weddings have purchased off the rack dresses as opposed to “wedding gowns” from “bridal shops” so I just didn’t have an accurate price in mind for how much this item costs. There’s a passage in Michelle Tea’s book How To Grow Up where she writes about accepting that certain produce at Whole Foods just costs the amount it costs. Radical acceptance, I believe my therapist would call it. You don’t have to like it, but it is what it is. I’m not a couture expert and I won’t pretend to be, but I’ve read enough of Cora Harrington’s work to know that we should pay appropriately for the labor it takes to make custom clothing. She’s tweeted about how a wedding gown is the closest most people will ever get to a custom clothing experience, and I kept that in mind while browsing. What I mean here is I don’t want to simply roll my eyes about how much dresses cost and ignorantly say they should be more accessible, because while the industry is overwhelming, when it comes to a dress, someone has put a lot of labor into creating it. So I want to acknowledge that. Wedding dresses that are essentially custom pieces are expensive! I just didn’t really know that before my research, because I was more familiar with people purchasing ready to wear dresses online, at cheaper stores, or from vintage boutiques.

Once I had done a fair amount of online browsing, I got my heart set on this shop in North Carolina, near where my brother lives. They have an entire section for plus size gowns, and a lot of their designers seemed to make exactly what I wanted: a ballgown that would make me feel like a fairy princess. My mom and I made an appointment to go dress shopping when we were visiting my brother for the Thanksgiving long weekend, and I accepted that my dress would cost thousands more than what I anticipated.

Meanwhile, my friends had taken my refusal to dress shop with them in stride and had asked my fiancée, who they’re also friends with, if she wanted to receive the bridal shopping treatment. She was insistent that she’d buy a dress online “for like $100″ but didn’t want to deprive my pals of their fun (and is never one to turn down a day to be a diva and get drunk on champagne) so the three of them went off bright and early one Saturday morning to three different bridal stores. And guess what? My sweet frugal babe found a dress she loved for $400 at the last store they visited and she bought it on the spot! It was a sample so she could take it home with her immediately, and it didn’t need a single alteration. I was like “wow babe, check out your size privilege!” — just kidding. I mean, I did say that, but we have a very healthy ongoing dialogue about fat liberation and living in different sized bodies, and I was joking — mostly.

So here’s the twist. My fiancée had her dress. My friends had experienced their fun day of bridal dress shopping. My mom and I were ready to spend an exorbitant amount of money in North Carolina. And then — my friend texted me. She’s the one who is helping me plan the whole wedding, and as such, her phone’s algorithm decided months ago that she’s getting married and treats her like a bride. Instagram had advertised a sample sale at a local bridal shop in downtown Portland for the following weekend, and she wanted to know if I wanted to go. “It’s very lowkey. No champagne. We can go, just the two of us. You don’t have to buy anything. It just might be good to try some things on in person. I called and they have a lot of dresses in your size.” I knew that I wanted to buy my dress in North Carolina — I already had my heart set on one in particular, in fact — and maybe relieving the pressure of actually looking for something is what made me change my mind. Or maybe it was that I could tell she had so heard my concerns and was trying to cater to them. Or maybe I was just feeling spontaneous that day. I said yes.

You know how this story goes. I bought the very first dress I tried on. I mean, okay, I tried on several more afterwards just to make sure I really loved it, but I did, I loved it, and so I bought it. It’s a ballgown. It has layers of sparkly tulle. It has iridescent beading. And my tits look incredible. I’m a fat fairy princess when I put it on, and it’s going to look fantastic with my bedazzled white Tevas (listen, I’m getting married in rural Southern Oregon — she’s a fat fairy princess but she’s also a land dyke, ya know?) And best of all? Because it was a sample sale, I could take the dress home right away, and the final cost was $1000.

The reason I wanted to write about this experience is explicitly to say to other fat brides that buying a dress does not have to be a negative experience. Here are the things that were most helpful to me: I did a lot of browsing before I ever went into a shop so I knew what I liked and I also knew what I did not like, I stayed true to myself and didn’t let myself get swept up in someone else’s idea of what I “should” do when it came to the shopping experience, I took one trusted friend with me and we agreed if the sales assistant had bad vibes we would leave (our sales assistant had amazing vibes), I went to a store that stocked gowns that would actually fit on my body, and I decided to shop a sample sale to get a gown that would have been much more expensive for a much cheaper price point. If any of these options are available to you, I would strongly recommend taking them (if, of course, you want a more traditional gown — there are plenty of options outside of a bridal shop wedding gown, and plenty of reasons to go that route if you’d prefer).

One other thing I would recommend, if possible — ignore the actual sizing in the dresses. I’d heard that for some reason the wedding dress industry sizes up a lot, so if you’re typically a size 20 or 22 you might be a 24 or a 26 in a wedding dress. That can make it frustrating when asking for sizes and can also mess with your head. Even though we all know there’s nothing inherently wrong about being a larger size, we live in a world that tells us there is, and when you’re feeling vulnerable and (literally) naked in a dressing room, things that we could usually be logical about sometimes have the power to ruin our whole day. The sales assistant helping me never mentioned sizes, she simply brought me dresses she thought would fit me. To this day, as it hangs in my closet waiting to go to the seamstress who will make all the necessary alterations next month, I have no idea what size my wedding dress is. “Who cares,” said my best friend when I told her that. “It’s your size, and that’s all that matters.”

So! I’m not saying buying a dress when you’re a fat bride is easy or completely stress free — I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. It can even be pleasant! I had only heard really awful horror stories about the experience of shopping for a wedding dress as a fat bride, so I wanted to put something hopeful and encouraging out into the world of wedding editorial!

When my fiancée and I both reflected on how adamant we’d been about buying our dresses online, and how funny it was that we’d both ended up purchasing options we found in person instead, she concluded with this very sound lesson: “It turns out, when you go shopping for a wedding dress, it’s very hard not to buy one!”

I think it would be fun to use the comment section as a place where anyone can talk about their wedding outfit shopping experience — tell us about your bridal gowns, tell us about your tuxedo, tell us about your thrifted outfit, tell us about your themed costume wedding — but I’d like to explicitly state that this is a space for fat people to talk about their experiences, share tips, and also vent or share fears if we want to, without being policed or concern trolled or body shamed. This is always true for Autostraddle’s comment policy. That said — okay y’all, tell me all about your experience of shopping for your wedding outfits! Let’s goooooooo!

Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.