Toughest Decision to Date...

Bridesmaid Dresses.

Oh Bridesmaid dresses. Where do I begin? I have never once cared what a bride made me wear. In fact, I've loved both of the bridesmaid dresses I've been forced into (in fact, I still wear Christine's!). So why do I break out into a cold sweat every time I think about dressing my maids???? I mean, all of my bridesmaids are beautiful women, with fabulous body frames. However, fabulous bodies do not always possess the same body type. Tall, short, breasts, no breasts, likes strapless, hates strapless, the list goes on. This demonstrates to me the difficulty of this task. When I look at dresses, obviously I generally look for what I think would look best on me. And I am of the short, small breasted, lover of strapless variety.

So...my fears. Basically, it's choosing the dress that appears to my bridesmaids to look like the following:

The solution: I give up. My maids get to pick their own dresses. Yep. I've seen this done via theknot.com and it can turn out beautifully. See the following:

Just lovely! In fact, it's even in my color! Oh how I love pink...but I digress. I'll pick the color and fabric, and the ladies get to go nuts on the style. Sounds so simple, right? Color, fabric, good price, and lots of choices! Well...

So I embarked on some research. First stop, websites. Since this is a new trend, there have to be bridesmaid dress designer websites that allow you to shop by color and fabric for this very idea. Wrong. Only, apparently, if you want to dress your bridesmaids in ugly separates (think prom dress nightmare circa 2001), can you shop by color and fabric to mix and match. Fine, I thought, I'll go to an actual bridesmaid dress store. They have to facilitate this, right? Wrong again! I walk into a huge wedding shop and while they have a million dresses, they do not possess significant dresses from a single line. And, apparently, not all fuchsias are created equal. Not only do different designers use vastly different color palates, but designers don't even use the same colors for different fabrics!(!!!)

So, after all of this, am I back to the pants-dress? No. I still value the comfort of those special ladies too much, and am still too uncomfortable to pick one style. So I'm working out a solution, involving a website that actually sells bridesmaid dresses at a discount and actually has whole "lines" of many designers. Now that I've found myself beyond the confusion of how to make what I want to do work, it's actually a lot of fun. Finding that perfect fabric/color/price combination is a challenge I am going to win.

Enter comparison shopping and research, something about which I am actually pretty passionate. I mean, I won't buy so much as a toaster oven without searching for the absolutely best reviewed/price combination. While this may take a little longer than I initially envisioned, I think everyone will come out a winner. :)

I feel better already!