To be honest, I hadn’t thought of wedding dresses since I was fifteen and an avid fashion drawer with three sisters as make believe clients. Being Eastern European, in those nine odd years since my drawing days I must have attended close to 30 weddings and the dress on each bride washed by like foam in the sea. There were the skinny girls who wore simple bias cut silk sheaths and then there were the girls with overbearing ethnic mothers-in-law who ended up wrapped in half a ton of tulle and diamantes.

Upon getting engaged I bought two bridal magazines. One was the thickness of a Beijing phonebook and full of shit I couldn’t afford, it contained more ads than content and of course, the obligatory Macedonian wedding of the year (I am sure there is a medal handed out for biggest Macedonian wedding). I thought I had done pretty well buying a leviathan magazine for twelve dollars but soon enough I had loaned that magazine to a flat mate to practice drawing comics from. He could only draw stick figures so drawing fashion models was a natural step for him.

I will never forget the first bridal dress I tried on. Naturally I had waited until a 42 degree day to attend ‘bridal appointments.’ I was a sticky mess and had as much luck getting the dresses on as trying to get on underwear without first drying my legs and arse after swimming. These monstrosities looked good in the window but close up they were a tangle of chiffon and silk weighing approximately the same as an intoxicated boyfriend draped around your shoulders. Worse still, these dresses seemed to have been designed for someone with a double mastectomy and not a full bust. I looked like a gothic snow queen with my boobs hovering somewhere just under my chin. Soon enough I was on Sydney Road, the Mecca of wedding stores but I remained fearfully on the safe side of shop fronts, gasping as though I was witnessing Peter the Great’s House of Freaks.

Unless you are marrying a media mogul and can afford to shop in Double Bay for a wedding gown, I have a few suggestions.
1. Lisa Ho and several Australian designers of her caliber have dresses that can work at a wedding and you can most definitely wear them again. Prices start from about $800 AUD.
2. Ebay. Some might say, I have an unhealthy relationship with this website but they can be damned. You never know what you can find.
3. Take that leviathan magazine, look at something you love, say that Monique L’Huillier gown and go to a dressmaker. That’s what I’ve done. My dress is costing me the equivalent of one month’s rent and that’s sort of OK.
4. You can wear your mother’s gown. Not very popular these days I know. Most of our mothers were married in the 80’s and that decade was very hit and miss when it came to bridal fashion.

Good luck!
Next week, I will delve into the much maligned 'bridesmaid' dress business