Wedding Style: Part 1

Sean & Meghan McNally's Wedding

The Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus

Sean and I just celebrated our 6 month wedding anniversary (woot!) and with working on the blog, it made me think of our wedding style.  Weddings are obviously massively important, but our philosophy was, it is essentially a party, so let us avoid getting stuffy about it.  Nonetheless, it is the ultimate party celebrating the rest of your brand new life with all your nearest and dearest so you had better make it an awesome one.  High stakes.  For this post, I will go over the bridal clothes.   

The Dress

Last year, my wedding dress shopping trips and internet research revealed that the national average cost of a wedding dress in 2009 is $1505.  I love beautiful things, and a girl's wedding dress is the single most significant article of clothing, so I was prepared to go a little crazy.  I love so many different dress styles so my one must was silk.  During the agonizingly drawn out shopping trips, I noticed that wedding dresses are just not worth their price tags.  Poorly made, cheap material, badly constructed, and generally just..froofy and boring.  I have enough knowledge of clothing, fabric and construction costs to figure out how much a dress should cost, and trust me: there is a massive mark-up on bridal gowns just because they are bridal, not because they are well made.  (At the average wedding dress shop, you’d think the color white was running out of stock on a global scale.)  So the choice was $1505 for a meh dress or $4000 for a knock-out, designer silk dress.  I was not thrilled at this point, and had developed a deep and burning dislike for wedding dress boutiques, and started seriously considering making my own dress.  Then my sister told me I should check out AriaDress.  Based on vintage designs, they use lovely material with a noticeable devotion to silk that I found very appealing (they offer dresses in 3 different types of silk!  Squee!) and keep the costs down by sticking to simple, classic designs.  If that seems unexciting to you in print, think of the Audrey Hepburn/Givenchy style revolution.  AriaDress also has the refreshingly retro attitude that the point is to make beautiful gowns - that happen to be white and worn for a wedding - and should be priced accordingly. 

The Jacket

The jacket I made myself.  It is made of silk and pont d’sprit, and I believe I spent a total of $25 for the material.  It took me forever to design and sew as working with that type of silk was like trying to nail Jello to the wall, but it was the perfect accent to the gown and was surprisingly warm.  Also, several of my close friends spent hours entertaining me as I finished it in the week before the wedding, (my friend Natalie actually finished sewing on the trim the morning of the wedding) so the jacket absorbed a lot of love during construction.    

Shoes

I bought my shoes on Amazon.  Since age thirteen, I wanted to wear white leather lace-up boots for my wedding.  I found Doc Marten boots on Amazon and blue striped Diesels for the reception.

Photography by Essence of Love Photography
Make-Up by Wendy Fitos