The Wedding Dress You Save on Pinterest Might Not Be the Dress You Fall in Love With
You’ve got the Pinterest board.
Your Instagram saved folder is overflowing.
You may even have the dress — or at least a very specific idea of it — firmly fixed in your head.
And then you start trying wedding dresses on…
…and fall completely in love with something else.
Welcome to wedding dress shopping!
Inspiration is brilliant — but it’s only the starting point
We absolutely love it when brides bring us photographs of dresses they like. It gives us clues.
Perhaps every dress you’ve saved has a square neckline. Maybe there’s a certain type of lace you keep coming back to. Perhaps they all have beautiful backs, fitted silhouettes or clean, simple fabrics.
Those pictures help us understand what catches your eye.
But they aren’t a shopping list we have to follow.
Because the biggest difference between scrolling through wedding dresses and actually shopping for one is very simple:
You are now in the dress.
A wedding dress is about more than how it looks
When you’re looking at a photograph, you’re seeing a dress on somebody else.
When you put one on yourself, suddenly there are so many other things happening.
How does it make you stand?
Do you feel comfortable?
Do you keep looking at yourself in the mirror?
Do you feel like you’re wearing a beautiful dress — or do you suddenly feel like a bride?
That last one is particularly important.
We can show you dresses that tick every box on your original wish list, but occasionally it’s the wildcard that changes everything.
“I would NEVER have picked this!”
We hear versions of this all the time.
And we love it.
One of the advantages of visiting an experienced bridal stylist is that we’re looking at your reaction as much as we’re looking at the dress.
As you try different styles, we begin to learn what is working.
Maybe you keep touching a particular fabric. Perhaps you light up when we add a veil. Maybe you suddenly stop worrying about the part of your body you told us you were self-conscious about.
Those little reactions tell us far more than a Pinterest board ever could.
That’s when we might say, “Will you trust us and try one more?”
And sometimes, that’s the one.
Don’t let your Pinterest board become a rulebook
There’s another reason we encourage brides to keep an open mind.
Social media can create a picture of what we think we should want.
You might see the same style repeatedly because it happens to be fashionable. You may have saved photographs because you love the whole image — the model, the flowers, the venue, the styling — rather than the actual dress.
And after seeing hundreds of similar images, it’s very easy to convince yourself that this is my style before you’ve ever tried a wedding dress on.
So use Pinterest. Save dresses on Instagram. Bring screenshots to your appointment.
We genuinely want to see them.
Just leave a tiny bit of room for us to surprise you.
Your dress doesn’t need to win on Instagram
This is something we feel very strongly about at Romsey Bridal Boutique.
Your wedding dress doesn’t need to be the dress that gets the most likes.
It doesn’t need to be the trendiest dress of the year.
And it certainly doesn’t need to be the dress everybody else would choose.
It needs to be your dress.
The one that makes you feel beautiful.
The one that gives you confidence.
The one you don’t really want to take off.
At our bridal boutique in Romsey, Hampshire, our private appointments give us time to really get to know you, understand what you’re looking for and gently explore some things you perhaps hadn’t considered.
Sometimes your Pinterest dress really will turn out to be your dream dress.
But sometimes your dream dress is the one you haven’t discovered yet.
And we think that’s part of the magic of wedding dress shopping.
