Mrs Moore-to-Be, She Doth Protest Too Much …

I could tell that no one believed me when I said that I was going designer wed­ding dress win­dow shop­ping in Lon­don.  All my friends seemed to think it inevitable that I would come back home with The Dress.

Their reac­tion was, I con­fess, under­stand­able.  My life­long over indul­gence in retail ther­apy is such that I have only myself to blame if it’s impos­si­ble for any­one to con­ceive of my going into a clothes shop — or indeed any shop — and com­ing away empty handed.

But this was, I protested, dif­fer­ent.  The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter was that I couldn’t afford a designer dress.  Even a dress at the lower end of the designer scale would, I insisted, be way beyond our wed­ding bud­get. This argu­ment, how­ever, did lit­tle to con­vince any­one.  I could almost hear the sound of sti­fled laugh­ter at the very thought of my using the word ‘bud­get’.  It was as if every­one — includ­ing H2B — con­sid­ered the phrase ‘Mrs Moore-to-Be’s wed­ding dress bud­get’ to be a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.

Deter­mined to con­vince the naysay­ers, I backed up my argu­ment by point­ing out that since I hadn’t seen my dream dress in any of the numer­ous wed­ding mag­a­zines I had devoured over the pre­vi­ous few months, it was highly unlikely that I would find it nestling amongst a rail of dresses in a Lon­don shop.

Per­haps you’re won­der­ing what my dream dress looks like. Well it’s soft and it’s floaty as well as struc­tured and ele­gant. It’s nei­ther too tight nor too volumni­nous. And whilst it’s very fem­i­nine and pretty, it’s not too girl­ish and youth­ful for a bride, like me, whose age makes her more likely to be flush­ing than blush­ing as she walks down the aisle towards her H2B.

But that’s not all that I demand of my dream dress.  It also has to blend in har­mo­niously with all the other ele­ments of our wed­ding so that it reflects some­thing of both the aes­thet­ics of the Vic­to­rian gothic church in which we are to marry as well as the pared-down style of our neo-classical wed­ding break­fast venue.

For those of you who are won­der­ing why I was pre­pared to incur the expense of a trip to Lon­don when I was so adamant that I wasn’t going to find my dream dress, I should explain that my inten­tion was to fig­ure out what suited me and to col­lect ideas so that I could come back home and have the said dream dress designed specif­i­cally for me by Shrop­shire based Jen­nifer Bone. More about Jenny and her inspi­ra­tional Bridg­north based busi­ness My Lit­tle Wed­ding Shop next time.  But if you fancy a sneak pre­view take a look at www.mylittleweddingshop.co.uk.

In view of this, I’m sure you’ll agree that I wasn’t in the slight­est dan­ger of being tempted to pur­chase any of the wed­ding dresses I saw in Lon­don on that Novem­ber day. But was my con­fi­dence mis­placed? Did my friends know me bet­ter than I know myself?  Was it inevitable that I would give into temp­ta­tion?  Or would I keep my credit card in my purse and my feet firmly on the ground?  To find the answer to these knotty ques­tions, hop over to www.awarwickshirewedding.com to read the first of a two-part instal­ment all about a most mem­o­rable day I shared with MoH and Mrs Adams.